It's January 1923, and the small rural town of Rosewood, founded and populated almost entirely by blacks, is destroyed by armed, angry whites. Many are killed, mostly blacks. The event was consigned to oblivion until recent years, when public notice has been taken in Florida and some compensation given to survivors. There are separate towns, churches and cultures, with fear, ignorance and sexual tensions. A white woman tries to cover up being abused by charging a black man with rape.
Rosewood is technically a class act.
There is plenty of violence, but with restraint. Thornton plays Karl Childers, a semiretarded recluse in the Arkansas Bible Belt. Normally mild-mannered, despite being abused and neglected as a child, Karl has acted once in a moral fury to destroy his mother and her lover with a sling blade, a farm cutting tool. After a quarter century of treatment, he's considered cured and released. He's a little scary.