ONE hundred and forty two minutes of cinema directed by David Dobkin and co-written with Nick Schenk (who also wrote “Gran Torino”) tangles a skein of plot threads, each engaging enough to constitute a story on its own, as family drama mingles with a courtroom battle.

For several decades Judge Joseph Palmer (Robert Duvall) has dispensed justice in a small Indiana community where local attitudes carry weight with a jury. His son Hank (Robert Downey Jr) is a high-priced New York criminal lawyer. Father and son have had no contact for many years. But as Hank, his marriage at implosion point, is about to defend a major criminal case, his mother’s death calls him home. Memories and suppressed conflicts arising from family history could by themselves constitute a useful film from this. But Dobkin and Schenk are about to crank up the drama.

The morning after Joe goes alone to get groceries, Hank and his older brother Glen (Vincent D’Onofrio) discover marks on Joe’s Cadillac suggesting it has been in an accident. Here is the genesis of a forensic drama that will see Hank defending Joe against the polished courtroom skills of the Attorney Dickham (Billy Bob Thornton) after police investigations establish that the marks resulted from a collision with the pushbike ridden by a man whom Joe had sentenced to 20 years for murdering a teenage girl. There’s more to that than those few words convey.

The performances by Duvall, Downey and Thornton are right on the mark, as you might expect. So is Vera Farmiga as tavern-owner Samantha, who has a history with Hank and a daughter who might be his (which Hank doesn’t learn about until after he’s been intimate with her). Jeremy Strong plays Hank’s intellectually-handicapped younger brother with sweet conviction.

Vigorous legal stoushes make for good drama. More procedural and evidentiary detail might not have detracted from the courtroom scenes. But the film contains enough material to sustain its effectiveness and credibility. One could hardly ask for more.

At all cinemas