“You joined the gang, man,” spits Mildred, the righteously furious protagonist of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, at the small-town priest visiting for tea in her kitchen. She’s wrapping up the hottest of multiple fire-breathing monologues, penned and played with equal vim by writer-director Martin McDonagh and star Frances McDormand respectively, and her analogy is a specific one – likening the Catholic church’s long-held complicity in acts of violence and sexual abuse to the Crips and Bloods’ protection of their own. In a midwestern community grimly riddled with crime and prejudice, Mildred suggests, her supposedly kindly pastor must bear some of the responsibility.

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But the “gang” she speaks of is bigger and broader than the church: it includes all manner of men who abuse and ignore women, and Mildred’s out to take it down. McDonagh’s film is a different kind of rape-revenge drama, one in which the roles of victim, avenger and perpetrator are split several ways, and in which a single criminal case comes to stand for a world of toxic masculine sin. It’s been seven months since Mildred’s teenage daughter was raped, murdered and set ablaze on a quiet stretch of country road, and still no arrests have been made or suspects identified. The dead girl’s emotionally lacerated mother wants answers from the community, not just regarding the identity of the killer, but as to why nobody but her seems invested in finding out.

It spoils nothing to say McDonagh himself is reluctant to give his character the answers she seeks. Her campaign for justice is reluctantly braided with the self-realisation of another member of the patriarchal gang: sexist, racist, dim-bulb police officer Dixon (Sam Rockwell), whose war of attrition with Mildred solves no crimes, save for perhaps making him recognise some of his own. Not everyone’s going to love this turn in a film that hitherto smashes the patriarchy in grand style, though male moral redemption isn’t the goal of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Perhaps it’s the optimum byproduct of women being heard.

By some degree of coincidence, then, McDonagh has wound up making an incendiary film for the present moment – one that arrives on screens just as angry mass awareness of male-on-female abuse is reaching a new peak in a variety of realms, but none more prominently than Hollywood itself. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was already riding high on the festival circuit, slaying critics and scooping major awards in Venice and Toronto, mere weeks before the first allegations against Harvey Weinstein broke, jump-starting a cathartic, industry-wide campaign of exposure and protest against the misogynistic abuse of male power.

Such a short time later, the context for the film’s release already appears to have shifted, the conversation around it gaining in urgency and pique. Consider Weinstein and his enablers in the symbolic gang identified by Mildred; consider Kevin Spacey, even, as McDonagh’s film opens out its view to a wider range of victims of alpha male violence. (Ebbing, it turns out, is no country for gay men or black men either.) The films that best capture the sociopolitical mood of their particular era are never the ones that set out to do so; you don’t capture the zeitgeist by ripping from the headlines. So it proves with Three Billboards, a film that has largely crashed into relevance.

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I say “largely”, of course, because McDonagh still hasn’t written this script in a vacuum, just as destructive misogyny wasn’t uncovered for the first time this autumn: it knows too well the socially ingrained hierarchies of gender, privilege and power against which Mildred so stridently bristles. Even without the immediate, discomfiting resonance of the Weinstein scandal, Three Billboards plays as a raging film for the Trump era, another dire social context for which it wasn’t even originally conceived. Appalling men have been getting away with murder, literal or otherwise, since time immemorial; if McDonagh’s film seems topical, that’s because the fury driving it is both ancient and eternal.

Which is not to say that the politics of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri are all that easy to pin down: its feminist heroine is a flawed one, her righteous mission disrupted by interludes of misanthropy and bad judgment, just as its grotesque male antagonist shows flickers of virtue. The film’s perspective, meanwhile, isn’t overly generous to anyone: some critics have raised eyebrows over its pithy comic treatment of everyone from homosexuals to dwarves to women less empowered than Mildred, under the guise of equal-opportunity offence characteristic of McDonagh’s oeuvre. In the age of Black Lives Matter, meanwhile, some may identify a faintly conservative defence of authority in the film’s conflicted portrayal of the police force – “We aren’t all the enemy,” Woody Harrelson’s sympathetic sheriff advises Mildred, and Three Billboards suggests something similar through the pinballing narrative and moral reversals of its second half.

Is there an undertow of #NotAllMen or #NotAllCops to McDonagh’s rousing portrait of a woman scorned? Such debates are likely to run back and forth as the film finds its audience in America and beyond, and as it heads robustly into Oscar season – arguably wresting nominal frontrunner status from Christopher Nolan’s less complicatedly heroic epic Dunkirk. (One has to ask: is now the moment for the Academy to elevate a film in which scarcely a female face features?) Often as spiky and ornery as its heroine, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is not a film that sets out to unite viewers. Yet it may become a more universal lightning rod than its dark-hearted creator could ever have imagined.