The Apostle.

Most of the noble monstrosities of moviemaking - Griffith's Intolerance, Gance's Napoleon, von Stroheim's Greed, Branagh's Hamlet - have been the work of actors or ex-actors. So it comes as no surprise that a film as amazing and as frustrating as The Apostle is the work of Robert Duvall, who wrote, directed, and financed it, and in the title role gives the greatest performance of his career.

He plays "Sonny" Dewey, a Pentecostal preacher in Texas, a man as unshaken in his faith as he is unstable in his moods. On stage, leading white, black, and Hispanic congregations in prayer, Dewey bellows, sings, stomps, dances, claps, whirls, performs. He has the charisma of Mick Jagger and the raw-throat power of Joe Cocker, and about as much sexual restraint as your average rock star on the road. Yet he's no fraud; he really believes he is literally opening the gates of heaven to those who hear him. But, sick of his infidelities, Sonny's wife takes a younger preacher to her bed and worse - much worse from Sonny's point of view - she conspires to get her husband evicted from his own congregation. In a fit of rage, Sonny slams his son's baseball bat against his rival's skull, then flees under an assumed name, "Apostle." The rest of the movie recounts the fugitive's effort to create a new congregation in Louisiana, an undertaking that meets with success just before the law closes in.

The Apostle has a genial, open-air look and a vibrant, forward-thrusting rhythm, yet possesses dark undertones. Most Americans with religious convictions feel there is nothing incompatible between their beliefs and their civic existences. But this isn't the way of Sonny Dewey. The man is daemonic (which, of course, is much different from demonic). The surges of sensuality that drive him to adultery also drive him to the lusty worship of God. His rage for salvation isn't plainly distinct from the rage that prompts him to crack a man's head open. When he keeps vigil outside the house where his wife is sleeping with her lover and toys with a loaded revolver, this minister hasn't forgotten God: he is talking to God, grumbling against God, egging God on to do something about his misery. "I don't know who's been fooling me - you or the devil. I'm mad at you, Lord."

Even after he builds a new life and congregation for himself, there remains something turbid and maniacal in Sonny's conduct. When a young troublemaker, for no apparent reason (a redneck angel sent to wrestle with a latter-day Jacob?) enters the new church and makes racial slurs about the integrated assembly, Sonny faces the intruder calmly. But when the tough threatens to shatter the preacher's organization, he is doing the same thing physically as Sonny's wife did organizationally, and Sonny's response becomes, once again, violent. In a second confrontation, Dewey wins the youth over with prayer in a scene surely meant to show the climactic triumph of Sonny over the darkness in his nature. Yet, as staged, there's a very fine line in this preacher between evangelical strength and gross, muscular force. Sonny's hand, so powerfully holding the back of the intruder's neck to keep him kneeling, could just as easily snap that neck. (But Duvall the director is having fun, too: featuring a local disc jockey giving a blow-by-blow description of how Sonny is working on the sinner, this may be the funniest conversion since Bill Walker was wrestled to salvation by the Salvation Army in Major Barbara.)

More disturbing still is the way Sonny works out his own salvation. Does he surrender to the police after assaulting his wife's lover or even after learning that his victim has died? No. He realizes that he has sinned, but how can he let himself be jailed when God is not through with him as a free-ranging minister? So he becomes a fugitive of God, not a fugitive from God. For Sonny Dewey, being law-abiding has little to do with working the will of the Lord. We all know that Caesar and God are often opposed, as witness the civil disobedience of Christians during the Vietnam War. But it's one thing to acknowledge this and quite another to countenance a hero who walks away from his crime and its lawful punishment so as to continue preaching. Is Sonny being absolutely sincere, or is there an element of self-deceit and willfulness in his nature? On this question, the film is fascinatingly ambiguous.

But it isn't just the content of The Apostle that disturbs but also its execution. There is a stylistic fissure in this movie and that is what makes it so maddening. The early sequences are powerful psychological drama, but most of the second half veers into documentary with its extraordinary recreation of Pentecostal worship. I was grateful for being taken into a world so foreign to everything I've known, but I also felt frustrated that Duvall, having established a character worthy of Flannery O'Connor, allowed the portrayal to be overwhelmed by documentarian verisimilitude. It's as if Wise Blood suddenly turned, midnarrative, into a PBS "Frontline" report on fundamentalism.

That said, I must also admit that the Pentecostal scenes are gripping, exhilarating, bacchic. They pound into us more thrillingly than any rock concert could. Sequence after sequence literally and figuratively sings: children chanting the names of the Old Testament books as they help to refurbish a church; the ecstasy on a black child's face when a rusty trumpet is blown during a service; another child windmilling his arms in joy as he hears the grown-ups testify.

And Duvall is a formidable director of actors. As the wife, Farrah Fawcett, who has grown ever more real as the years have aged her away from Angelhood, makes Sonny's betrayals of her visible in her face. Billy Bob Thornton, as the troublemaker, turns a too-schematic role into a believably disturbed young man. Rick Dial, a nonprofessional playing practically the same guy he did in Sling Blade, is again instantly and tenaciously likable. Most startling is the way the flamboyant British actress Miranda Richardson subdues herself to the role of Toosie, Sonny's second love, creating a woman both fluttery and firm, nonplussed and flattered by her suitor's ardor but strong enough to take a clear look at the turbulence beneath that ardor. At a preview screening, Texas-born Horton Foote (who wrote Duvall's Tender Mercies) mistook Richardson for a nonprofessional from Texas, so precise yet unfussy is her performance. But there are a bunch of unprofessionals in this movie, and Duvall coaxes all into an utterly convincing group portrait.

But make no mistake about which performance will rule your memory once you leave the theater. If Director Duvall's devotion to naturalism rather undermines the dramatic articulation of his story, Actor Duvall's mastery of naturalism keeps Sonny Dewey's fate a living issue in our minds, no matter how thickly the documentary details crowd. His sixty-six-year-old body may have thickened with age, but Duvall has kept it supple enough to make Sonny a dervish on the religious platform, while his voice is an instrument that can harangue, caress, bark, wail, or simply bang. Some of the mannerisms we've seen before: the cockily waggling head from Lonesome Dove, the bowlegged strut from Apocalypse Now, the shy suitor's gaze masking inner fire from Tender Mercies. But it doesn't matter. Like Michael Caine, Duvall knows how to recombine his tics and flourishes so as to create a man we've never seen before. And when that bland face is shadowed by jealousy or glows with faith, we know that the actor has conceived of Sonny Dewey as a temple where spirits assemble: furious spirits who urge murder and beneficient spirits who forgive and embrace. And all these spirits must dwell together forever.

Let nothing I've written keep you from seeing this movie. There is nothing quite like The Apostle in the history of American film.