Joe 15

A gripping mix of friendship, violence and redemption erupts in the contemporary backwoods South in this adaptation of Larry Brown’s novel, celebrated at once for its grit and its deeply moving core.  The film brings Nicolas Cage back to his indie roots in the title role as the hard-living, hot-tempered, ex-con Joe Ransom, who is just trying to dodge his instincts for trouble – until he meets a kid (Tye Sheridan, TREE OF LIFE) who awakens in him a fierce and tender-hearted protector.  

The story begins as Joe hires hard-luck teenager Gary Jones and his destitute father onto his “tree-poisoning” crew for a lumber company.  Joe might be notoriously reckless with his pick-up, his pit bull and especially with women, but he sees something in Gary that gets to him:  a determination, a raw decency and a sense of resilience he can just barely believe in anymore.  Gary has truly had nothing in life – he’s never even spent a day at school – yet something drives him to take care of his family, to keep his sister safe when his father turns monstrous, to hang onto hope of a better future. 

Joe and Gary forge an unlikely bond, one that will irrevocably change them both. When Gary finds himself facing a threat greater than he knows how to handle, he turns to Joe – and sets off a chain of events that play out with the brutal inevitability of calamity and the beauty of a last stab at salvation. 

JOE is directed by David Gordon Green (ALL THE REAL GIRLS, UNDERTOW, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, PRINCE AVALANCHE) from a screenplay by Gary Hawkins (THE ROUGH SOUTH OF LARRY BROWN) based on the novel by the late Larry Brown (Big Bad Love), the former Mississippi firefighter renowned for his Southern-Gothic storytelling and universal themes of honour, desperation and moral rectitude.