Watching a Nicholas Ray film, it’s hard to feel good about the state of mainstream cinema in the 2020s. Ray never shows off. He doesn’t arrogate the full force of his talent to specific, privileged scenes. His films don’t explode off the screen. Instead, they achieve a kind of surface tranquility through the many febrile currents teeming within. His films superficially comply with the accepted forms of mid-century Hollywood, drawing out their inner plasticity and complexity without ever trying to make a show of exceeding them. In an early scene, aging yet apparently accepting ex-rodeo star Jeff McLoud (Robert Mitchum) returns home to his Texas birthplace after 18 years of itinerant stardom. The old man who lives there now recognizes him as the child from long ago, and they comically commiserate about the vagaries of achievement and the limits of desire.

The problem with “books on success,” the older man intones, is that they are written by “successful” people rather than “written by a failure.” In a long-shot, Ray holds on the older man on the right, shuffling around in the background with his normal routine. On the left, in the foreground, is McLoud, Mitchum letting his eyes loose on the part of the room we can’t see, seemingly taking in a vision of his past that the film does not afford us, a corner of the room that remains invisible to everyone but McLoud who, we intuit, has simply never stopped hustling for long enough to recognize that he has a past. This is a phenomenally suggestive image, Ray looking on at the two men who are sharing a story (and a mental framework) while also surviving within two entirely different registers. For one man, the house is a question of existence, and for the other it is an existential question.

Yet Ray has to insist on nothing, exposing layers of emotional reality without the characters speaking a word. This, more than anything, is what Jean-Luc Godard meant when he famously said “cinema is Nicholas Ray.” Reader, this is such a simple scene, such an apparently basic visual composition, but when do we see movies that actually even think about character blocking anymore?

The Lusty Men, in this fashion, is a quietly desolate film, the kind of piece about wayward, astray people who are so caught-up in the moment that they don’t even really understand themselves as being unanchored. In this modern-set Western, people are trapped by the vortex of the past and unfulfilled anticipations of the future, lost in a present that cannot fulfill them, or that they cannot allow to fulfill them, lest they give up on their self-imposed narratives of future, forever-deferred success. A Ray film is caught up in itself this way, aware of its energy but unable to stop it for more than a second at a time. The Lusty Men, then, is a film that knows how to kick up dust and to acknowledge the dust in its eyes, that aspires to and cowers before its own hell-raising. It thrives on the vitality of its ragged men and women, but it understands this raggedness as both a friction and a premature death. Ray was what we might call a weirdly expressionist naturalist, his cinema too hot and heightened to hold onto a reality bucking underneath it and too cold and sober to not recognize how tenuous its grasp really is. His cinema projects the fantasies his characters survive on, and it has a drink for the detritus of their being.

Ray’s inimitable skill as a director is his pragmatic affection for the tensions of these dreams, his ability to force us to reckon with his characters rather than to judge them. Jeff has lived and lost many relative fortunes and generally seems disinterested in making a new one. What precisely drives him shifts throughout the film, but Ray’s film has the hard-gazing empathy of a Robert Altman film, an appreciation for people getting by even when the film knows they are deluding themselves. While Jeff has lived the fabled life of masculine independence, having lived by the seat of his pants and won and lost more fortunes than most would ever see, Arthur Kennedy (Wes Merritt) has not. Tied down by debt and family, he is the domesticated, emasculated male, or at least he feels himself to be one, and he is all too willing to tell himself that lighting out to the rodeo world will provide more for his family when, in reality, he simply wants to live out his nation’s mythic vision of unencumbered masculinity for his own sake. When Jeff decides to take Arthur under his wing, Ray’s film discovers a man trying to relive his past glory through another, a second man who basks in the glory of that man in hopes of living a life more unbound, and a woman, Arthur’s wife Louise (Susan Hayward), who wants nothing else but to teach these two men the limits of their ways because they are impeding her ability to find happiness.

In this Bermuda triangle of tortured emotions and displaced desires, The Lusty Men updates the rancher vs. farmer wars of the period-set Western and explores its relevance for the modern day. What is the nature of freedom, and how is it a tool to create narratives of self-oppression? Among its other successes, The Lusty Men is one of the great American texts of roaming as a prison of desire, a fetish for a world of heroic nomadism that doubles as a form of what Lauren Berlant called “cruel optimism.” “Hope,” Jeff remarks in the film, is “a funny thing. You can have it even when there ain’t no reason for it.” Perhaps more saliently, by focusing on the modern-day rodeo, The Lusty Men exposes the romantic vision of untrammeled masculinity beckoning the characters as a transparently fabricated, spectatorial reality, a narrative tool of capital rather than a dream that can maintain any illusion of “authenticity” or organic attachment to the land. This is a Western identity that has been thoroughly commodified, if it was ever anything else.

In a scene early in the film, the characters lay the saddle down on Arthur’s horse, and Ray films it like it’s a holy grail. An hour later in the film, Ray’s camera settles on Arthur’s tokens of victory, and he can find only fetish objects, totems to a version of American masculinity that has stolen his well-being, a tableaux of objectified fragments of his soul that replace his personhood. These objects become like the titular statue of The Maltese Falcon, shifting matrices of need in a modernist void where the meaning and value of a seemingly holy object is of dubious logic, or the titular Treasure of the Sierra Madre, obelisks of a desire that simply cannot be quenched. These are guardians of a masculine sense of self turned into bearers of a door from which the owner is forever barred. They will never be enough.

Although they never worked together again, Robert Mitchum was a natural interpreter for Ray’s maximalist-minimalism. Mitchum somehow manages to both overplay and underplay everything, projecting a man torn between himself, teeming with unresolved inner conflict, and yet somehow placid, having stemmed the torrent by becoming and riding the eye of the storm. “I forgot people get up at four thirty,” he remarks at one point, and the way Mitchum quietly accents “people,” as if to say that he isn’t sure he is one anymore, makes sure we recognize it not as a judgement about them but about himself.

But judgmental The Lusty Men is not. When past-his-prime rodeo-man Booker (Arthur Hunnicutt) tells a story about his past success, only for Jeff to casually remark that he heard the story once before, about someone else, Booker simply responds “I think that’s where I heard it.” In its own way, without any over-inflation or intimations of mythopoetic significance (as in, say, John Ford’s nonetheless phenomenal The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence), Ray’s film is able to show how fabrication and tall-tale telling are simply part of this game of life, an element of this world to be acknowledged rather than bemoaned or celebrated. In this moment, the characters share a casual camaraderie, and there’s no sense of condescension in Ray’s direction. Nor is there in the hard-won performances, even when the characters seethe with guarded frustration or resign to a form of stasis masked as movement. Susan Hayward is phenomenal as the deeply pragmatic yet romantic Louise, as is Maria Hart as independent-minded Rosemary Maddox, who runs her own life in the guise of submitting to someone else’s, as is Lorna Thayer’s Grace, the wife of a once-proud, now-trapped man who can’t recognize how the source of his trap was the energy of his pride.

When Grace leaves the film, and relinquishes her position in this world of trapped souls, her statement “you can have the trailer” is immediately undercut by Arthur’s “I bought this rig,” a statement of noble rejection dimmed into a mere transaction. That tension between tragic-poetic refusal and material making-due could describe Ray himself. He was a notable genius whose star became a black hole, imploding before its time, before it became a diffuse nebula, spreading through the French New Wave and, thus, the New Hollywood, perhaps at the expense of his own career. One book about him has been subtitled “glorious failure,” but this seems to be both a mark of shame and a medallion of pride. The Lusty Men follows his early masterpiece In a Lonely Place, another portrait of compromised masculinity in a cloistered world, and, before that, his seering debut They Live By Night, a lucid, liquid lament for equally confused outsiders that influenced an entire genre of French critics, and, by proxy, their American interpreters, from Terrence Malick’s transportive Badlands, to Arthur Penn’s vicious, auto-erotic Bonnie & Clyde, to Robert Altman’s comparatively under-sung Thieves Like Us. The Lusty Men would be succeeded by Ray’s claim to fame, Rebel Without a Cause, the famous mid-century film of disaffected ennui and hopeless curiosity which was itself surrounded by his phenomenally untamable Johnny Guitar, which explores the domestication of the wild, and his throbbing, neurotic Bigger Than Life, which interrogates the wilderness within the domestic. You’ll note that most of these titles could also be descriptions of Nicholas Ray’s own life, either reflecting his own ethos or a cruel truth that was forced upon him. Rebel evokes his dissidence and amorphousness, Bigger his maximalism. Live by Night his nocturnal energy. And The Lusty Men his, well, lust.

Yet within Ray’s filmography, The Lusty Men is both paradigmatic and somewhat uncharacteristic. He seldom engaged the world with this sort of rampaging naturalism, nor framed the loneliness he was drawn to within such a sociological milieu. At times, The Lusty Men, obviously influenced by the concurrent works of Jules Dassin and others, approaches a documentarian’s sense of observational acumen. It seems to exist within an unusually open, composite, porous world, one in which people come and go, rise and fall, continue and collapse (sometimes at once). The brutal irony is that, while this changes the texture of the film, it cannot change its perspective. During a key ride, the camera instead chooses to observe Louise outside the rodeo stadium, in another phenomenal, bifurcated shot where she sits contemplating her life in the foreground on the right, the stadium looming in the background on the left and the announcer’s voice drowning the air in violent excitement. Enacting a principled refusal of participation in the competition, she nonetheless runs toward the stadium when the announcer implies her husband may have been hurt, only to skulk back into the foreground, toward us, when he is revealed to be okay. She, like Jeff in the opening shot, is clearly a social being, existing in relation with this background presence, but her face radiates a consternation that is visible only to us. While this may be Ray’s most social film, it cannot avoid suggesting that we are all, finally, doomed to live in lonely places.

Score: 9/10