'Three Billboards' a twisty, well-told, Coen-esque tale

Editor's note: This story was updated to correct the name of Mildred's daughter.

<h3 class="briefHead">"Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - ★ ★ ★ ★ </h3>

You can consider Martin McDonagh's "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" a terrific Coen brothers movie never made by siblings Joel and Ethan.

Not because it stars Joel's wife Frances McDormand (who's appeared in more Coen movies than any other actor).

Not because the Coens' fave composer, Carter Burwell, supplies the evocative score.

Mostly because "Three Billboards" skillfully blends other Coen-esque elements: shocking, abrupt acts of violence; diabolically dark humor; wildly evolving empathy for its characters; and a nebulous ending requiring us to contemplate what happens next.

I cannot remember the last time a simple line of dialogue caused my heart to skip a beat. "Three Billboards" does that during a flashback between a daughter and a mother.

Another line of dialogue, delivered by Peter Dinklage, squeezed my heart: "I didn't have to hold your ladder."

That sentence means nothing in a movie review. But in context, it reveals the crushed soul of a man at the very moment he realizes his love will never be returned.

"Three Billboards" opens with Mildred Hayes (McDormand) observing three dilapidated billboards outside of her small Missouri town. She decides to rent and restore them.

She paints on them three blunt messages asking why Police Chief Bill Willoughby (Woody Harrelson in a role fitting tighter than a proverbial glove) hasn't found a single suspect seven months after the rape and incineration murder of her daughter Angela.

Mildred's bold, accusatory billboards against a beloved police chief - dying of pancreatic cancer, as we quickly discover - turn the small town against the angry, grieving mother.

Especially one of the chief's loyal employees, a racist cop named Dixon, played by a spontaneously combustible Sam Rockwell as an intellectually lacking, loser mama's boy.

Rockwell is fearless in exploring this hissable Id-with-a-badge, down to showing us what makes him tick like a time bomb.

His performance should be sufficient reason to see "Three Billboards," along with Harrelson's portrait of a man who constantly ambushes us with new information that changes how we view the chief.

Then there's McDormand, for whom the phrase "force of nature" was invented.

Monomaniacally focused on her daughter's murder, Mildred abandons all social constraints, taking on the world with Shakespearean fury and obsessiveness.

She doesn't care that her ignored teenage son Robbie (Lucas Hedges from "Manchester by the Sea") must deal with public backlash from his mom's outrageous behavior.

Mildred's physical assaults on three high school students (without any ramifications) stretches the credibility in McDonagh's otherwise tightly constructed screenplay, but they work dramatically.

Charlie (John Hawkes), Mildred's ex-husband, pleads with her to cease her embarrassing campaign. He's less embarrassed by his ditsy 19-year-old girlfriend (Kerry Condon), who might be a little more than she appears.

McDonagh, building on his works "In Bruges" and "Seven Psychopaths," defies crime mystery conventions in "Three Billboards," an odd subset of rape-and-revenge films in which male-dominated authority tangles with the kind of hell that hath no fury like a Frances McDormand scorned.

<b>Starring:</b> Francis McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage, John Hawkes

<b>Directed by:</b> Martin McDonagh

<b>Other:</b> A Fox Searchlight Pictures release. Rated R for language, sexual references, violence. 115 minutes