Premiere: "White Lightnin' "

Before the first midnight screening of "White Lightnin' " Sundance programmer Trevor Groth noted that "sometimes we show films that defy categorization" and this film certainly lived up to that. A rollicking, terrifying trip through good-times Americana and nightmares of madness and revenge, the film tells the not-entirely-true story of Jesco White.

For those who have not seen Jacob Young's 1991 documentary "The Dancing Outlaw" -- and if you haven't, you really should -- Jesco White is a champion Appalachian dancer, continuing a tradition that has run in his family for generations. Part tap, part clogging, part quest for spiritual freedom, Jesco's dancing is truly one-of-a-kind. Add to that his larger-than-life personality -- marked by violence, addiction and more than a little genuine crazy -- and he is everything strange and sad, funny and wonderful about rural American culture.

Directed by Dominic Murphy from a script by Eddy Moretti and Shane Smith, "White Lightnin'" is no simple reading of Jesco's story. Rather, they use the bones of his life as a jumping-off place, taking the story to places fantasical and horrifying. "Walk the Line" it is not.

Edward Hogg stars as Jesco, in a star-making performance of remarkable range and quicksilver agility. In preparing for the role, the British-born actor met the real Jesco -- "He's crazy as hell, but you fall in love with him straight away," Hogg said in an interview the day after the screening -- and even learned steps from the master himself. Though a stand-in was shot, the actor exhibited such a feel for the dancing that all the footage that made it into the film is Hogg himself.

As for the amazing, implacable look of serene bliss that is on Hogg's face whether he is dancing, huffing gasoline or attacking someone with a hatchet, both Hogg and Murphy recalled that the director would shout "be nice!" at the actor as he delved into evil behavior. "I told him, the more angry you get, the more polite you've got to get," recalled Murphy the next day.

Murphy told me how the filmmakers made the decision to follow Jesco's real story and where to leap off into a world of violent revenge and salvation that is of their own devising.

"It wasn't about the real Jesco, it was a more twisted imagining of what could have been, or might have been. And some of the things that happen in the movie are things Jesco describes, that he has imagined or he wants to do. For me it made complete sense in a kind of poetic sense."

-- Mark Olsen