Breaking from the herd

After decades as an art-house legend, “Killer of Sheep,” Charles Burnett’s 1977 film about life in Los Angeles’ Watts ghetto, has finally received a theatrical release. Long kept from the public due to licensing issues with the soundtrack, Mr. Burnett’s movie, an ultra-low budget, black-and-white affair made while he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, earned a reputation among cinephiles and critics as a secret cinematic jewel.

Since its release, the critical reception has almost universally upheld that reputation, with numerous top-tier critics and publications — including Manohla Dargis of the New York Times — hailing it as a masterpiece. But despite its warm reception, Mr. Burnett’s feature is less than astounding, a gangly, uncertain first picture — haunting and revealing at times, for sure — but roughly constructed and lacking a sure directorial hand. It is, in other words, a fine, even memorable, student film, but little more.

What story there is revolves around Stan, a struggling slaughterhouse worker (hence the title) in L.A.’s poor, primarily-black Watts neighborhood. He is down but not entirely out — his life is a slow drag of hardships and uncertainties that promises only more of the same, yet it is not entirely without humor or community. Stan longs to lift himself out of poverty, but from moment to moment, he has only foggy goals and vague notions of how to accomplish them.

Stan’s lack of direction informs the entire structure of the film. Mr. Burnett evinces only a passing concern for narrative, preferring instead to concentrate on mood and tone. He’s a poet rather than a storyteller, and while this produces some of the film’s best moments, it also creates a number of its problems.

Mr. Burnett clearly has a gift for crafting strong sensory experiences. His ragged, mostly handheld camerawork and his moody score, made up largely of scratchy, slow jazz, combine to form a handful of truly lovely moments. The image of Stan slowly dancing with his wife, silhouetted against a window in their broken-down home, for example, has an undeniable raw elegance. And Mr. Burnett often cuts away from the main action to show children playing and fighting in the streets; they act as the film’s chorus, often paralleling other action and serving as a reminder that the shapeless, uncertain lives of the poor in Watts will continue for generations to come.

But assorted fragments of music and imagery do not a satisfying movie experience make. The acting is as crude as one might expect from a cast of mostly amateurs, and while some of the dialogue has a nicely improvised, naturalistic feel, much of it comes across as stilted.

Mr. Burnett occasionally nods in the direction of narrative, bringing up a handful of subplots and extraneous characters, but he rarely follows through on what he starts. Seemingly at random, he’ll simply interject a long, unrelated vignette in which the main characters play only peripheral roles, as if he grew tired of the main characters and their lives and decided to film something else for a day. He can’t decide whether to veer off the story path entirely and follow his imagistic impulses or whether to give the film a discernible narrative shape. The result is a muddle in which neither impulse is fully developed.

“Killer of Sheep” clearly owes a debt to the Italian neorealists, a group of mid-20th century filmmakers who felt that film should, above all, expose the plight of the underclass. But these filmmakers, at their best, remembered to connect their stories to powerful, individual narratives, a feat Mr. Burnett never quite manages. Despite its fleeting poetry, “Killer of Sheep” works best as a sociological curiosity, an abstract, meandering, intermittently artful record of life in 1970s Watts, but not a great story of it.

**1/2

TITLE: “Killer of Sheep”

CREDITS: Written and directed by Charles Burnett

RUNNING TIME: 83 minutes

RATING: Not rated (language, some slaughterhouse gore)

WEB SITE: www.killerofsheep.com

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS