Quotes of the Day

Policemen with fearsome reps need punchy nicknames, especially if their real names are as bland as Dave Brown and Joe Cooper. So the L.A.P.D. Detective in Oren Moverman's Rampart is known as Dave "Date Rape" Brown, because years ago he killed a man suspected of being a sexual predator. And the Dallas cop in Killer Joe is — Killer Joe Cooper.

The two movies, on display this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, have more in common than peace officers with mean monikers. They are a pair of deranged, charismatic cops played by Texas charmers who made their reps in light comedy. Woody Harrelson, of Cheers and medicinal weed fame, is Dave Brown in Rampart, which reunites him with the director of his Oscar-nominated role in The Messenger. And Matthew McConaughey, who earlier this year took a break from insipid romcoms and made a strong dramatic impression as the hotshot attorney in The Lincoln Lawyer, slips into Cooper's reptilian skin in the William Friedkin film of Tracy Letts' 1993 play. Neither movie is wholly satisfying, but both are brazenly weird character studies — Killer Joe eventually leaps into psycho territory — that give their stars a chance to work dark and dangerous variations on the agreeable personalities they've honed for a couple of decades.

Harrelson's Dave, in the screenplay by Moverman and L.A. crime poet James Ellroy, is a dinosaur of the city's blue boys. He uses old-fashioned methods of interrogation, cracking a suspect's head to elicit a crack-house address. "This used to be a glorious soldiers' department," Dave tells a young female cop of mixed-race background. "And now it's — you." He also insists, "I am not a racist. I hate all people equally." But this is 1999, when a real-life scandal in the Rampart precinct exposed the corruption and brutality of many policemen against the neighborhood's predominantly Hispanic citizens. So when Dave beats up a man whose car slammed into his, and his punishment is videotaped and aired on TV, he's fingered to take a fall. Of course Dave won't jump: beyond being mulish, he's as eloquent in legal jargon as he is in street talk. Someone high up will have to be as crafty and amoral as he is.

Moverman has assembled a plush supporting cast: Steve Buscemi as the D.A., Sigourney Weaver (on the mark in her few scenes) as an L.A.P.D. lawyer, Ice Cube as an Internal Affairs investigator and Ned Beatty as a tired, retired cop who advises Dave, "You could just stop beatin' people up." Cynthia Nixon and Anne Heche play Dave's sister-wives, not in the Mormon sense but just as complicated: he married one woman, then her sister, has a daughter by each and is divorced from both but still lives next door to them. Robin Wright lends her weary luster to Linda, a mysterious figure Dave meets on one of his night-crawls. "You are the most beautiful woman I've ever met," he tells her. "In this bar." He's also wary of Linda's instant attraction to him: "You have a courtroom suit and litigator eyes." That's an example of Dave's gift for quickly appraising people's motives — part of what makes him such a good bad cop.

As grimy visually as it is gritty in its narrative, Rampart declares itself an indie film rather than a mainstream movie by spending lots of time studying its star's distinct profile while he prowl-cars through the L.A. night. That's often a sign of directorial indulgence or vacuity, but Harrelson rewards watching; he's no less potent at rest than when he explodes in calculated rage. Moverman (who halfway through the Toronto festival had yet to find a U.S. distributor for the film) would be wise to engage the actor again, and extend The Messenger and Rampart into a trilogy. "We've done two movies with Woody in uniform, as a soldier and a police officer," the director told the Los Angeles Times. "So I guess now he has to play a postal worker."

Killer Joe makes a point of going postal from the start — as Texas rain pelts a trailer, a frantic Chris (Emile Hirsch) begs to be let in, and the door opens to reveal the luxurious crotch of his stepmother Sharla (Gina Gershon) — then gets defiantly bonkers. In hock to a drug lord, Chris needs money quick and stumbles on to the scheme of hiring a hit man to dispatch his mother, whose $50,000 life insurance policy is supposed to go to his sister Dottie (Juno Temple). Chris has heard of Joe Cooper (McConaughey), a Dallas cop who moonlights as a contract killer. Joe's nonnegotiable price is $25,000, but in its stead he might take the slutty, virginal Dottie as a kind of carnal collateral. That's a proposition that Dottie's dad Ansel (Thomas Haden Church) agrees to, rationalizing "that it just might do her some good."

In his first play, written in his mid-20s, Letts was just starting to scale the craggy comic heights he'd achieve in 2007 with the Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. This garish species of Southwestern Gothic rolls a little too pig-like in the mud of its shock value, as Joe smoothly manipulates members of this backward brood into humiliation, desperation and, in one of the all-time "What!?" climaxes, the forced fellating of a fried chicken leg. ("You're very good at this," Joe tells his victim of the moment. "Please moan.") But, hey, if star actors want to risk their careers in an S-M amorality play, it's only good manners for audiences to check out the rubble.

Besides, Killer Joe serves as a sort of bookend, ornamented with gargoyles, to two important films early in Friedkin's directorial career. One is the 1968 The Birthday Party, a faithful adaptation of Harold Pinter's play depicting a man (Robert Shaw) being teased and terrorized by visitors who insist it's his birthday. The other is The French Connection. Forty years after that Oscar-winning drama about a New York City detective (Gene Hackman) obsessed with finding a French heroin dealer, Friedkin revisits the theme of crazed cops, but with the emphasis less on police work than on the splendor of psychopathy. Popeye Doyle, meet Drumstick Cooper.

One way for a star actor to expand his range is to play a riff on his basic character in a strategically different context. McConaughey has lately given evidence he could be an avatar of Paul Newman — specifically, Newman as Hud, the rancher dude with acres of Texas charm and not a square foot of scruples. He played that card smartly in The Lincoln Lawyer; here, his Joe is totally bad and quite possibly mad, but McConaughey employs the same effects as in his romantic comedies. He uses his sotto-voce musicality for threats instead of wooing, but he speaks to his prospective clients about a murder as he would to a pretty girl about dinner and a movie. Of the five characters in Killer Joe he's the sickest and the most comfortable in his role: whispering master to the family's wailing, pathetic slaves. A McConaughey male, in any movie, always thinks he should be on top.

Toronto 2011 has proved to be a cool showcase for genuine movie stars either in full strut (Brad Pitt in Moneyball) or locating rich subtleties (George Clooney in The Descendants). McConaughey is no less impressive and quite a bit bolder, doing pro-bono work in this indie-movie equivalent of an off-off-Broadway play. I'm told that Killer Joe, which had its world premiere a week ago at the Venice Film Festival, is close to finding a U.S. distributor. McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role — more likely, they'd skip the opportunity — but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

• Richard Corliss