The theme of the flawed father-figure runs deep in western cinema – perhaps unsurprising given that an estimated third of our children grow up in "broken" homes. Love 'em or hate 'em, "defective" or just plain absent, there's no denying the psychic hold of fathers, that most formative, fundamental of relationships.

The film Joe, David Gordon Green's latest offering, belongs to a tradition of American existential cinema begun in the 1950s by Nicholas Ray, and the titular Joe (a bearded Nicolas Cage) to its lineage of father figures haunted by the spectres of alcoholism and violence. The film is a small-town family drama of mythic resonance, akin to a Sam Shepard play shot by Terrence Malick. Like Green's early films, with their rural settings and elliptical storytelling, Joe owes a debt to Malick. There are echoes, especially, of Days of Heaven (in which a young Shepard appeared) in the scenes of working men toiling and at rest, the use of non-professional actors and the accompanying naturalism of the performances, and in a beautiful montage late in the film ( of which more later).

Joe, the foreman of a team of forest workers, becomes close to Gary (Tye Sheridan), a boy whose own family is poor and dysfunctional in the extreme. Joe is a man in existential conflict, struggling to contain his alcoholism and violence; he's a man trying to do the right thing. Cage's Joe is low-key, gruff and taciturn, but simmering with pent-up rage. He has no choice but to assume the paternal role with Gary – with inevitably tragic consequences.

The sorry state of the father in much of Hollywood's postwar output could be blamed on one man: Gregory Peck. As film fathers go, his Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird symbolizes the archetype: strong yet gentle, morally (ahem) impeccable, self-sacrificing, possessed of a rich and resonant baritone, and with no wife around to complicate matters. Peck embodied an ideal of the father so unattainable that many subsequent cinematic dads headed straight to the bar to drown their sorrows.

In Joe, Gary's biological father Wade and Joe himself are confirmed alcoholics, and even Gary and Joe's father-son relationship is cemented with a beer. Wade is played utterly convincingly by Gary Poulter, a homeless man Green met in Austin, and who died in a homeless shelter shortly after filming was completed. Where Joe appears to be self-medicating with alcohol, Wade's drinking is introduced at first as humorous and even charming, with an impromptu body-popping routine that he performs for Gary. Quickly, however, the mood darkens with his addiction, until it swallows all vestiges of his humanity. A scene in which a thirsty Wade silently follows and then seemingly befriends another drunk, before hammering in his skull with a pitchfork-shaped piece of metal, is among the most chilling depictions of evil I've seen.

In Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray dressed James Dean's dad in a pinny and explored the devastation wrought on the adolescent psyche by the absent and inadequate father. But it was with Bigger Than Life, in 1956, that he took apart the American patriarch, using teacher Ed Avery's addiction to cortisone to expose the hypocrisy and psychosis beneath the 1950s ideal of the middle-class male. James Mason's Avery experiences an alcoholic omnipotence that reaches its horrific peak when, towering over his son, a pair of scissors held aloft, he declares: "God was wrong!" to have spared Abraham from killing his own son in the biblical parable.

Bad dad come good ... Tye Sheridan and Nicolas Cage in Joe. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library/Dreambridge Films

Joe's contemporary cousins include Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas. Sam Shepard's story takes place after the father's drinking and jealousy have destroyed his family, with Harry Dean Stanton's Travis emerging from four years living alone in the desert, having concluded that, as Shepard has written of his own father, "he doesn't fit with people".

Much of the film is concerned with Travis's struggle to reassume the paternal role, and the scenes of his faltering attempts at becoming a father to his son Hunter again – the playful walk home from school on opposite sides of the street, his seeking advice from his brother's maid on how a father should conduct himself ("to be a rich father, Señor Travis, you must look to the sky and never at the ground") – are touching. Later in the film, when Travis and Hunter find the boy's mother, it becomes clear that the emotional violence Travis inflicted on her mirrored his own father's treatment of his mother, a "kind of sickness" that manifested itself in delusion and jealousy. Stanton's delicate bone structure and "kinda raggedy" hangdog visage perfectly articulates Travis's regret at the damage he has done. Despite having reunited Hunter with his mother, he cannot bring himself to take up his own place in the family.

Affliction, Paul Schrader's unflinching portrayal of generational violence, also explores the cyclical nature of flawed fatherhood. For Nick Nolte's Wade, who is beaten by his alcoholic father as a boy, violence is hereditary and inescapable. Separated from his wife and unable to connect with his daughter, his suppressed rage comes to destroy him. The film traces his breakdown as the layers of his identity – husband, dad, cop – fall away, until circumstances pull him back home to face his father. Adapted from a Russell Banks novel, the film deviates from Schrader's usual narrative trajectory to end without hope. As Schrader puts it, he tends "to end my pieces on a kind of grace note … with some sense of moral grace". No such luck here; the circle remains closed.

Reading on mobile? Click here to view Nick Nolte in Affliction

In interviews, David Gordon Green has referred to Joe as a samurai looking for an honourable way to die. The character's self-imposed emotional isolation, unshakeable sense of right and wrong, and a refusal to bow to any law but his own do add up to something like the classic hero's code of conduct, for which the samurai represents the archetype.

Recognising an aspect of himself in Gary, Joe must reconcile this code with the need to take responsibility for another soul, that is to assume a paternal role. In the end, Gary is saved by Joe not only physically, but also spiritually, and enters adulthood relatively unscathed by the trauma of his childhood.

Green keeps his Malickian visual motifs restrained up to now. After Joe dies in Gary's arms, however, he gives us a montage of shots of the forest at sunrise. It is a truly transcendental moment, as if Joe's spirit has become one with the place we most associated him with (apart from the bar that is). With the simple silent beauty of sunlight streaming through trees, Joe – and all of us flawed fathers bearing witness – are granted a kind of redemption.

• Peter Bradshaw's Joe review – Nicolas Cage cuts a brooding figure