Blood for Dust

Rod Blackhurst’s middling thriller “Blood for Dust” begins with blood born of a suicide splattering a framed photograph. If nothing else, you know what you’re in for right away, a somber, humorless neo-noir that works well on its own terms if one is willing to feel as miserable as Scott McNairy looks. He is Cliff, a walking contradiction, a god-fearing regular at church with his wife who also likes to eat his meals at strip clubs. He is a salesman traveling I-90 in Montana, peddling defibrillators, Shelley “The Machine” Levine of “Glengarry Glen Ross” but if he was a bitter Big Sky vampire drearily going through the motions amongst the living. And when he loses his job after the embezzlement of his past comes to the surface, he turns to his old colleague, not friend, underline, Ricky (Kit Harrington) who offers a gig running drugs and guns along the same interstate he traverses, hoping a quick buck might be the way to defibrillate his own life.

Ricky is a familiar character, as “Blood for Dust” is a familiar movie, and Harrington’s sturdy performance is right in line with “Blood for Dust” itself, familiar and sturdy, full of surprises that really aren’t surprises at all if you’ve seen this sort of movie. Blackhurst, at least, colors between the lines with some flair. His sense of atmosphere, in fact, ultimately eclipses his sense of story, not to mention his staging of gunfights, presenting a glum world of motels and strip clubs and fast food and dismal tract housing and endless orange lights. That we hardly get to know Cliff’s wife and son feels right for his traveling salesman character; they are far away, insignificant. In one sequence, as Cliff and Ricky talk, Blackhurst puts the camera in the backseat of the car, looking through the windshield, at a future disappearing in the darkness.