But Beer for My Horses is nonetheless a moderately interesting cultural document, especially at this inaugural moment, because it is very clearly presented as an entertainment of, by, and for red state America. It features an earnest, low-key amiability, but one that is generally reserved for its white-male protagonists and that occasionally veers unexpectedly into the bizarre and reprehensible. (I should perhaps note here that I am a lifelong blue-stater with only a passing familiarity with Toby Keith; but my wife, with whom I watched the movie, is a big-time Keith fan who grew up all across the South.)

The movie borrows its title from Keith’s 2003 number-one hit with Willie Nelson, who also has a small role. (The chorus: Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses…) Alas, there are no horses in the film, let alone beer-drinking ones. The overlap between song and movie is essentially limited to the thematic, a kind of inchoate enthusiasm for “law and order” that carries the usual political, cultural, and racial undertones. (The movie’s dispiriting tagline, “Vigilante Justice: It’s a Real Blast!”, does little to quell accusations—denied by Keith—that the initial song was effectively pro-lynching.)

Keith stars as “Rack” Racklin, a deputy sheriff in the hamlet of Mangum, Oklahoma, and Carrington plays his pal Lonnie—also a deputy, albeit a vastly less capable one. The two enjoy a life of relatively low-effort policing (mediating domestic disputes, etc.) until their lives are beset by a pair of misfortunes: First, Rack’s lawnmower is damaged. (This takes place when his longtime, live-in girlfriend—played in a barely-there cameo by Gina Gershon—leaves him; one of the movie’s running gags is that everyone in town considers the mower the greater loss.) And second, on a routine surveillance outing, the boys wind up arresting a Mexican drug dealer whose brother is the head of a major cartel.

Conveniently for Rack, the true love of his life, Annie (Claire Forlani), has just moved back to town from Chicago. Less conveniently, after their first reunion date, she is kidnapped by the aforementioned cartel lord, who promises to kill her unless his brother is released from jail. Avatars of American manhood that they are, Rack and Lonnie drive to Mexico to rescue her.

Again, more interesting than the plot—this may be the definition of a low hurdle—is the cultural signage that the movie consistently offers for display. There’s a scene set in a honky tonk to establish that Rack and Lonnie are the kind of guys who hang out at a honky tonk; a pig-hunting scene to establish that they’re the kind of guys who hunt pigs; and a scene at church to establish that they’re nominally churchgoing, even if Lonnie gets in trouble for snoring during the service. Rack and Lonnie take the latter’s brand-new truck to Mexico, in order to underline just how holy an object a brand-new truck is. (It is not the only subplot to make this point.) And Annie usefully reminds us that her life in the “big city”—the phrase is used constantly—was inferior to life in small-town Mangum.