I'd never even heard of this film – apparently it was done for HBO a while back – but it was a John Cusack film I'd never heard about, and to me he's an interesting enough actor that I'll try something blind for his sake.

Jack Bull is set in the 1870s; Cusack plays horse rancher Myrl Redding, an honest man trying to make an honest living on his Wyoming farm. Unfortunately he crosses paths with local tycoon Henry Ballard (L.Q. Jones), who decides to give Redding a hard time and mistreats some of his prize stallions and one of his Native American workers. When Redding demands justice, of course he finds the deck stacked against him, so he takes the law into his own hands.

Jack Bull, while a compelling story, is also an examination of the concept of 'natural' law vs. civil law, and poses some questions about just how much of a right we have as men to be treated fairly no matter the circumstances. The story could have been a moralistic whitewash, but by making Myrl less than perfect the movie aims a lot higher, with satisfactory but occasionally unsettling results. It would be easy to just take the side of the little man against the big rich fella (like they did in, say, Silver City) and here it's not hard to do that. But Myrl's complexity and his occasional slips – he's no saint, though he tries hard to do no damage to the innocent – render this story in much darker, richer colors than lesser hands would have.

Cusack is excellent here, as he usually is. His uncompromising performance as Myrl dominates the picture, and Cusack displays the man's drive and determined nature without ever overdoing it or descending into melo-drama. Most of the rest of the cast is fairly strong as well (I particularly enjoyed Scrubs' John C. McGinley's turn as simple sidekick Woody), with a standout turn by John Goodman as a dedicated lawman named Judge Tolliver. The end trial, as a result, is a powerful capper to a movie that questions moral choices throughout.

Though a darker film, Jack Bull is an excellent piece, with well thought-out characters, motivation, and execution. It offers no easy answers, though it does conclude its story with finality, and in the end only reinforces that the consequences we suffer are a direct result of the actions we take. This one may be a little hard to find (I got it from Netflix), but it's certainly well worth the search.