‘WIND RIVER’

R 1:51 ★ ★ ★ ★

With the drug cartel thriller “Sicario” (2015), the West Texas bank robbery yarn “Hell or High Water” (2016) and the new, Wyoming-set “Wind River” (2017), screenwriter Taylor Sheridan has created an unofficial trilogy of crime stories sharing an unstated moral.

It goes like this: Follow the rules in America, whether you’re an innocent victim, a charismatic outlaw or a valiant, frequently outmatched law enforcement official, and you’ll either go broke or get killed. Soulless bureaucracy, economic deprivation and human greed may be bad for the citizenry. But they’re great for stoking a writer’s pulp imagination.

“Wind River” marks Sheridan’s feature directorial debut. The script this time sits a few steps down from “Hell or High Water,” especially, though it’s fairly compelling for considerable stretches. The movie begins on a cold night, with a young woman running across the snow while lines from a poem are spoken by a solemn, ancient-sounding Native American with a voice like the wind itself. This is the woman who becomes the corpse discovered in the snow, miles from anywhere, by a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tracker played by Jeremy Renner.

The ensuing rape and murder investigation, on Native American land, invites a tangle of competing law enforcement officials. In from Las Vegas, a rookie FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) asks the tracker, Cory, to assist her in the case. Local sheriffs and the Tribal Police chief (Graham Greene) join the investigation, warily.

Olsen’s character in “Wind River” learns as she goes, usually from vaguely or brazenly patronizing men. The harsh conditions on the Wind River reservation involve meth heads, drug dealers and, higher up the mountain, petroleum company laborers whose lives, one man says, are nothing but snow and silence. Cory’s life, meanwhile, is defined by grief. Three years earlier, we learn, his daughter (best friends with the dead teenager discovered in the snow) was murdered, with no resolution to the case. Cory shares custody of his son (Tio Briones) with his emotionally numb ex-wife (Julia Jones), and their son’s biracial heritage is spelled out in an early scene of father teaching son horsemanship skills.

“Wind River” is roughly 50 percent strengths, 50 percent contrivances. Often they collide in the same scene. Early on there’s a tense, violent clash in a grubby trailer that begins with mace in the eyes and ends with fatal gunshots. But when Renner’s tracker enters the scene, shovel in hand, there’s something off in his demeanor and behavior; suddenly we’re watching the unflappable, casually brutal actions of a Clint Eastwood fantasy figure, not a man who’s simply good with his reflexes and on his feet. Likewise, Sheridan delivers a standard-issue slaughterfest for a climax, reinforcing the protagonist not simply as a man of action but an avenging angel of death, in snowmobile goggles.

Starring: Kelsey Asbille, Jeremy Renner and Julia Jones. (Strong violence, a rape, disturbing images and language) — Michael Phillips, Associated Press