ArcaMax

America in the 1970s and '80s was for some reason fruitful ground for wing-nut racial psychopaths and frothing antisemites. These people cursed their oppression by ZOG -- the "Zionist Occupation Government" -- and yearned loudly for the extermination of Jews and Blacks and, basically, anyone else who wasn't them. Their literary taste, such as it was, ran strongly toward "The Turner Diaries" -- the 1978 race-war novel by William Luther Pierce, which still gets passed around in racist precincts today. Back then, the book's adherents were likely to number among their Kameraden members of such groups as the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi paramilitary organization founded in the 1970s by a Hitler fan named Richard Butler.

At one point in Justin Kurzel's "The Order," a gripping new crime thriller about the real-life hate merchants of that period, we find Butler, played by Victor Slezak, addressing a group of followers in a small country church in Idaho. The room is festooned with Nazi flags -- Butler is in his element. But there's something he doesn't realize: At this very moment, he is fading into history. There's a new generation of antigovernment zealots rising up, young men like Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult), an affable farmer with a sunny smile and a head full of dark ideas. These people are tired of the namby-pamby racist mewling of their elders; they want revolutionary action -- the real thing, with guns and bombs and all -- and they want it now.

Mathews gathers a ragtag assemblage of rural malcontents to assist him in fighting for the establishment of a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon and Idaho are clearly in need of real Americans). Inspired, the amateur warriors Mathews has recruited respond hopefully to his tutelage. To raise money for their empire-building, the group starts robbing small businesses, ripping off banks and Brink's trucks, and getting into counterfeiting and occasional murder, too. (The 1984 assassination of Denver radio host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) was their most notorious undertaking.) Before long, the group's activities draw the attention of a local FBI agent named Terry Husk (Jude Law), and soon Mathews and his group (called the Order, also the Silent Brotherhood) become the subject of a full-scale bureau investigation.

Law and Hoult, with their winning low-key charisma, are nicely matched. Law's Agent Husk is weary from the strain of a crumbling marriage and from his previous assignment putting away gangsters in New York City; Hoult's Bob Mathews, meanwhile, has the energy of a cheery young fanatic. (Both actors are English, but neither ever lets his American accent slip.) Husk's campaign to put Mathews and his crew out of business evolves into an engrossing police procedural of a traditional but superior sort. This is of course a recommendation.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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