The relationship between singer Nick Cave and filmmaker John Hillcoat has been a fruitful one over the years; while Hillcoat has done a lot of music-video work for Cave's gothic-blues group The Bad Seeds, Cave has also worked on Hillcoat's feature films, providing music for "The Road" (2009) as well as screenplays for "Ghosts of the Civil Dead" (1988) and "The Proposition" (2005).

Their latest collaboration is "Lawless," which features a Cave treatment of Matt Bondurant's 2008 novel "The Wettest County in the World," which Bondurant loosely based on the exploits of his own grandfather, a hillbilly entrepreneur/gangster who ran moonshine in backwoods Virginia during the prohibition era. Cave even formed a new group, The Bootleggers, to record the film's moody, Appalachian-inflected soundtrack. (Which also features bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley doing a cover of, believe it or not, The Velvet Underground's "White Light/White Heat.")

At times lyrical, at others sadistic and unforgiving, "Lawless" is clearly Cave/Hillcoat territory, right down to the bible-thumping preacher and a gnarly tar-and-feathering. The story follows the Bondurant brothers, who are trying to move beyond their hardscrabble existence by selling home-brewed alcohol to the city speakeasies. Forrest and Howard (Tom Hardy, Jason Clarke) are both big menacing types who nobody wants to mess with, but youngest brother Jack (Shia LaBeouf) is a wannabe criminal who can neither put up or shut up.