Blood for Dust Review: Stone-Cold Sleekness Becomes Rod Blackhurst’s ’90s-Set Noir

You can tell they shot Blood for Dust outside. People’s cold breath hangs in the wintry air, and it’s not the kind of wispy CGI breath that never seems to move quite right. Half-melted snow clings to the streets and straw-yellow Montana hills. The film’s title and poster would blend right into a direct-to-video lineup, but director Rod Blackhurst brings surprising texture and craft to bear on the otherwise familiar proceedings of this ’90s-set noir.

In a rare lead role, dependable and charismatic character actor Scoot McNairy plays Cliff, a traveling salesman whose tired eyes give away his success on the job. Maybe he was persuasive once, but he’s now tough to imagine peddling anything to anyone, much less the defibrillators that he crams into the back of his station wagon alongside the dummy he uses to demonstrate them. He even botches an attempt to blackmail his boss when he’s let go.

The film, written by David Ebeltoft, opens on a suicide discovered by Cliff and his partner, Ricky (played by a horseshoe-mustached Kit Harington with a fluctuating “good old boy” accent). It’s a grim sight, brains splattered all over beige office walls in response to a failed embezzlement scheme. Yet Blood for Dust spends enough subsequent time in the drudgery of Cliff’s existence to make the scene feel like one more setback in a long run of bad luck. His son is hospitalized, bald from chemo, and he celebrates his minuscule commission from a rare sale by leaving his motel room to eat a burger alone at the bar of a strip club.

Ricky re-enters his life in the low light of that strip club, which Blackhurst and cinematographer Justin Derry depict with the same slow, seething camerawork used during a scene of Cliff in church with his wife, Amy (Nora Zehetner), on Sunday. Cliff eventually finds himself meeting with Ricky’s boss, John (Josh Lucas), a man who exudes menace from behind big glasses. Cliff will sell guns and occasionally run drugs, appearing so bland and unassuming that no one will think to pull him over and check the compartment of his station wagon.

Just as our understanding of who Cliff is begins to change, Blood for Dust hangs its themes on an unsubtle monologue about how these men are always selling something to somebody, whether that’s their prospective clients or loved ones or the world at large. Ultimately, the film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere that the filmmakers derive from evocative locations and crummy brown interiors that make every place look like it has a smoking section. Blood for Dust may not seem like much at first, but much like the protagonist at its center, it swiftly begins to demonstrate its canny skills.