Pulp doesn’t get much pulpier than Black Snake Moan. In the ads, eternally menacing Samuel L. Jackson, sheeny with sweat, is standing over nubile Christina Ricci, a heavy chain looped around her ankle and the tagline “Everything’s Hotter Down South.” The blues-infused melodrama behind it is indeed made with lurid blocks of sex, dirt, rage, and incipient violence. But writer/director Craig Brewer, a budding auteur with this sort of material, manages to get it just beyond the sum of its parts.

Jackson is Lazarus, a Scripture-quoting farmer and a former bluesman whose woman just done left him for his brother. Ricci is Rae, a trailer-park moll who suffers from a condition somewhere between epilepsy and nymphomania and greets passersby with a jaunty, “kiss my rebel *****i*, *a****!” The tiny Tennessee town they share is a crass milieu of humid juke joints and slack-jawed good old boys. What a gumbo — every stereotype that makes people uncomfortable with the South: religiosity, hypersexuality, racial tension, and poverty. So bad, yet so tasty. A tablespoon of humanity is boiled in too. Rae is able to fend off her libidinous spells, and find a measure of peace, as long as her sensitive boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) is around. But when he ships out for basic training, it only takes a few backsliding hours of pill popping and fornicating for Rae to end up badly beaten in a ditch outside Lazarus’s farmhouse. Lazarus tends her bruises. When he realizes what her real illness is though, he abruptly decides on an experimental procedure: keep her from her compulsive whoring by chaining her to a radiator.

Brewer turbo charges his pulp by throwing as many taboos into the mix as he can. Even before anything happens, the oozing sexuality of the premise and the seamy insinuation of the title are enough to make you three kinds of tense. And for the first half of the film, it doesn’t stop. It’s unsettling to watch Rae bluntly offer Lazarus what she assumes he wants if he’ll just let her go. (Lazarus seems to be the first to turn it down.) Even creepier is the glimpse you get of why she’s so eager to give herself away.

With characters as broken as this, the blues score (and the bluesy ambiance) that Brewer wraps around the production fits well. Brokenhearted, Lazarus digs his guitar out of storage and plays the blues. In the middle of a thunderstorm, as he and Rae confront their shared fears of loneliness, Lazarus plays the blues. When things start to look up, Lazarus plays the blues. It may be too much for non-aficionados. But Black Snake’s blues help carry some of the emotional intensity that its far out plot can’t. And though mixed in a bit bafflingly, archival clips of 1930s blues master Son House explaining the essence of the music lend the story a bit of intellectual fiber. Not much, but more than Kill Bill manages.

Jackson learned to play guitar for the part, but that’s as far as he ever gets from the smooth badassness we know and love. Even when he’s belting it out, the lyrics are about someone being shot in the head. The bulk of Black Snake Moan’s expression belongs to Ricci, who plays Rae with a childlike candor, and whose outsized eyes and tiny head (perched atop that long, long neck) suggest more profound imbalances beneath.

Together, Lazarus and Rae manage to right themselves — or at least start to. As abruptly as he began treatment, Lazarus unchains Rae. After a few days of being something other than a sex object, she isn’t sure freedom is what she wants after all. The pair turns heads when they venture into town together. But not quite why you’d think. Lazarus drifts into the orbit of wholesome church lady Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson). And Ronnie blows back to town. And Black Snake Moan ends, not with profanity, or slap, but with a pickup bed full of saccharine.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Brewer wants this all to add up to something. But mostly, Black Snake Moan just ends. Having rung Pavlov’s bell for us — having dangled those lurid, taut taboos and stereotypes — Brewer leaves us there to salivate.

Go ahead. Cluck your tongue. Of course pulp is bad. It turns everything it touches — sex and violence usually — into a tawdry cartoon, colored with sensation and high emotion, devoid of thought or respect.

That debasing power works both ways though. It lowers things we ought to elevate. And, in its own campy way, it can also cut things we respect too much back down to size. The social consensus is that the kind of racial and regional stereotypes that pervade Black Snake Moan are bad. The default response has been to try to yank them out of common usage and, by clumsy forbidding, put them high on shelf where no one will ever be able to reach them again.

There’s a noble motivation behind it to be sure. But put anything up on a shelf and people will drool for it all the more. Brewer takes his stereotypes and rolls around in the mud with them. He makes Lazarus and Rae just what the worst in you would expect southerners to be. Then, without breaking the caricatures, he adds just a little rhythm and color to them.

By the end, the stereotypes don’t seem either campy or barbed, and the pulp isn’t so hard to swallow.

– Louis Wittig writes from New York.