From the vast shelf of craggy mountaintops to the snow-dusted ground that sits like concrete, the bleak, wide-open Montana landscape may be The Slaughter Rule's most formidable character; it's an unyielding taskmaster holding sway over its inhabitants. Against this backdrop, six-man regional football teams do battle for a few odd dollars in front of the locals, but like the boxing scenes in Raging Bull, the games become a gruesome arena for masculine ritual, with emergency vehicles on hand to scrape up the crushed bodies. In their grim, evocative debut, writer-directors Andrew and Alex Smith delve into the knotty psychology behind such willful masochism, centering on two men who turn to the game as a way to toughen the exterior around their soft insides. Superb as the troubled son of a former pigskin great who died under suspicious (and likely suicidal) circumstances, Ryan Gosling plays the natural extension of his neo-Nazi character in The Believer, a young man so gripped by self-loathing that he channels it through brutality. After he's cut from the high-school varsity team, Gosling enters into a complex friendship with David Morse, a grizzled coach who recruits him as a quarterback for six-man football, a physically demanding game that requires players to work on both sides of the ball. Initially bemused by Morse's eccentricities, he grows increasingly alarmed by his coach's sexual intimations, which not only shake Gosling's uncertain manhood, but also open up a tragic secret from the past that sheds new light on their relationship. Gosling is torn between his expected toughness and his underlying sensitivity, and his confusion infects his affair with Clea DuVall, a local bartender who sees his redeeming qualities, but grows frustrated by his resistance to intimacy. Mercy comes at a high price in The Slaughter Rule, which makes reference to a time when the game is called after either team goes up by more than 45 points. The Smiths get a little too much mileage out of the title metaphor–;most egregiously with a symbolic deer hung up in barbed wire–but they show a rich understanding of the frontier codes that still dominate the untamed West. Though some of Slaughter Rule's conclusions are overly tidy, the film's powerful meditation on masculinity gets much of its credibility and punch from the two leads, especially Morse, a reliable character actor who sinks his teeth into a role with heavy physical and psychological demands. Cued to a plaintive country score by Son Volt's Jay Farrar, The Slaughter Rule visits a section of America that remains untamed, a punishing place that contains the raw materials for the national character.