James Franco has been working hard to make it difficult for serious people to take him seriously. There's his promiscuity with projects unworthy of his talent, on both the big screen and small, including his starring role in the circus of social media, all those preposterous selfies he seems so proud of. There’s his literary posturing, short stories frozen in an embryonic phase, poetry so insipid it’s like listening to an oboe blown by an emphysemic. There’s his fetishizing of literature, films about Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane, and the forthcoming Bukowski. There’s his self-loving stare on the movie poster for As I Lay Dying, a movie that might have been titled As Faulkner Lay Writhing in His Grave (Franco’s version of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is now in post-production). There’s his collection of MFAs and his near-publicity-stunt admittance to Yale University, which left some of us incapable of ever seeing ivy the same way again. One applauds Franco’s energy and ambition—in some cases there's nothing else to applaud—but it’s getting well nigh impossible to spot the line between this great actor’s devotion to art and this narcissist’s devotion to his own outsized ego.

With such an eagerness to prove himself literary it was no doubt inevitable that Franco would turn to Cormac McCarthy. It’s taken 41 years and a filmmaker of Franco’s particular fearlessness to put Child of God onto the screen because, although it’s McCarthy’s most filmable plot—taut and efficient, bloody and brief—the novel’s lead is a cross-dressing and murderous necrophile named Lester Ballard. Stripped of his property, cast-off in the hills of East Tennessee, a solitary ghoul beyond the grasp of god or law, Ballard enacts his otherness, his macabre agency in a world without rescue, a cosmos without redemption. He ravens the forest with a rifle, shelters in an abandoned shack, and becomes obsessed with the injustice of losing his property. The townspeople have always suspected his squalor of soul, his unholy appetites: The novel is punctuated by first-hand accounts of Ballard’s sinister ways and warped sense of communion. An expert marksman, he wins three stuffed animals at the shooting gallery of the local carnival and then treats them like children. When women go missing and police begin their search of the hills, Ballard flees underground into a system of caves where he arranges his coterie of corpses in a stone room both catacomb and boudoir. A spirit this diseased must descend to infernal depths, must dwell with the dead.

Franco's As I Lay Dying might have been titled As Faulkner Lay Writhing in His Grave.

Franco’s script, written with Vince Jolivette, remains as loyal as possible to McCarthy’s novel. Franco and his cinematographer, Christina Voros, have pegged the proper aesthetic, the frigid and pitiless beauty of a landscape adverse to human happiness. They have a fine eye for the yellows, grays, and olive drabs of the East Tennessee hills in winter, the muddied pathways, the naked boles, the splayed reach of trees. The original score by Aaron Embry augments the tenor of the narrative when it doesn’t obtrude upon and tarnish that tenor. The beauteous Nina Ljeti gives the best portrayal of a dead girl you’ll ever see. You won’t mind Tim Blake Nelson sleepwalking through this one, doing a passable caricature of a backwoods sheriff, because the film belongs to Scott Haze as Lester Ballard. This is a virtuosic performance by Haze, one of uncommon concentration and imbued with a feral, frightful intensity. He’ll be nominated for every major award and if there’s any fairness left on earth he will win most of them. He has the eyes right—skewed and skeletal—and the gait, moving with “a constrained truculence,” and also the perplexed grind of the jaw just as McCarthy describes: “his thinly bristled jaw knots and slacks as if he were chewing but he is not chewing.” Haze gives Ballard a voice barely born, rarely intelligible, a slurred and ruined warble.

Film adaptations of McCarthy’s novels tend to generate powerhouse male performances—Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, Viggo Mortensen in The Road (though not Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses, a film of prettiness and horses but not much else)—and although Haze’s performance outstrips them all with its ardency, it also makes several missteps. There’s a suggestion of mental impairment in the garbled voice, and this serves to absolve Ballard of his evil—it begins to explain what must remain inexplicable. Haze’s Ballard is a noisy wastrel; he grunts, growls, and howls in an exacerbated expression of animality, but madness plays best in reticence. God is terrifying because God is silent; to be equally terrifying the child of God must aspire to an equal silence, must arrive at a place beyond superfluous sound.

Franco is determined to humanize Ballard in a misguided quest to make him likable, as if likability were a conduit to credibility and not just a pandering to audience members. Franco has written for Ballard a handful of sobbing close-ups, tears of abjection and dread. In another deviation from the novel, Ballard assassinates the stuffed animals he won at the carnival, weeping as he mumbles about having no friends. Franco has also excised the essential flood scene, the town submerged after a punishing rain—an intimation of divine reprisal, a plague upon these people for the transgressions of mankind. “I never knew such a place for meanness,” a woman says of her inundated town. McCarthy speaks of this locale as a “fabled waste,” but Franco’s realist, too-simplistic rendition denies the narrative this fabled and mythic register, and in doing so neuters much of the novel’s potency.