Sling Blade marks Thornton's debut as a feature director and solo screenwriter (his previous screenplays, including A Family Thing and his best, One False Move, were written with Tom Epperson). All of Thornton's films are about coming to terms with the misdeeds of the past. In a chilling monologue at the beginning of Sling Blade, Karl explains how, as a child, he endured years of parental abuse before stumbling upon his adulterous mother and her lover and killing them both with the title implement. After 25 years in an Arkansas mental institution, the state has deemed him fit for release, though Karl has no desire to return to society.

Back in his sleepy hometown, the mechanically gifted Karl finds work in a repair shop and a friend in a non-judgmental boy named Frank (Lucas Black). Soon, Karl is living with Frank and his mom, Linda (Natalie Canerday), and enjoying a tentative friendship with Linda's department-store co-worker, Vaughan (John Ritter), a gay man as out of place in this small Southern town as Karl. But there's a viper in their midst: Doyle (Dwight Yoakam), Linda's alcoholic, abusive, increasingly domineering boyfriend. It's not hard to guess where the conflict between Doyle and Karl will lead -- his destiny seems as preordained as a character in a Greek tragedy (or a Faulkner novel) -- but the movie takes its sweet time getting there.

In his first film as a director, actor Thornton shows how much he enjoys the little moments in his actors' performances (especially his own) that reveal character detail, but these moments accumulate to little effect other than slowing down the film. Still, Karl remains a compelling and unique character. He's not a romantic nutjob (à la Shine or Angel Baby), and he's not a holy fool whose mental impairment makes him morally superior or lets him float through a more charmed life than the rest of us. Rather, he's the anti-Gump, someone whose childlike mind is still capable of wrestling with the moral question (as does Huck Finn) of whether to go against what he's been taught and damn himself to Hell in order to save a friend. Karl reads the Bible, and he knows all about the sins of the fathers (his own father, played in a horrifying cameo by Robert Duvall, remains bitterly unrepentant) and reaping what you sow.

Thornton miraculously avoids resorting to stereotype in any of his characters, in part by casting against type. (An exception is Black, effectively playing a threatened, unpretentiously good boy as he did on TV's American Gothic.) Ritter, who played a straight man pretending to be gay for so many years on Three's Company, now plays a gay man without mincing. Canerday, who had a small role as Bill Paxton's wife in One False Move, shines here as a feisty but tired woman resigned to the consequences of the choices she's made. The blandly malevolent J.T. Walsh is unusually scary as a depraved mental patient who's emblematic of the banal hellishness of the institution that has been Karl's home. (Also watch for downtown hipster filmmaker Jim Jarmusch as a fast-food fry cook.)

Most surprising is Yoakam, the country singer who proves convincingly menacing as Doyle but who also gives his villain a pathetic, marginally self-aware side (when he apologizes to Linda and Frank, he does it as self-servingly as possible). He's dimly aware that he's not sensitive or PC, but he's not about to change. His inflated opinion of himself extends to his role as leader of a hilariously bad garage band (including fellow real-life musicians Vic Chesnutt and Col. Bruce Hampton). Yoakam is even impressive in his lack of vanity; the singing heartthrob seldom seen without his Stetson shows off his rapidly receding hairline in every shot.

Thornton's Karl, though, is what makes Sling Blade unforgettable. His piercing eyes, perpetually out-thrust jaw, and froglike monotone are hard to take at first, but they grow on you. Not that Karl asks for forgiveness or even sympathy. He wants only to be left alone, and even that is denied him.

NEW YORK -- "I'm really nervous. My knees are shaking," Billy Bob Thornton told the audience at the recent New York Film Festival screening of Sling Blade, his writing/directing/acting hat trick. "I'm afraid you're gonna hate me and my life and everything I've ever done."

He needn't have worried. The screening was followed by the most thunderous applause a Lincoln Center crowd of New York media movers and shakers had ever bestowed upon a guy named Billy Bob. Later, Thornton acknowledges that the media elite in New York and Hollywood have patronized him before because of his Southern background. "It used to be a real problem. These days, it's like, `Well, you've made some money. You're one of us now.' "

The Arkansas-born Thornton is best known for confronting the South's complex racial legacy in the screenplays he wrote (with Tom Epperson) for One False Move (in which he co-starred) and A Family Thing. As in Faulkner's stories, reconciliation with the past is an important theme for Thornton, because "I had a really screwed-up past. Filmmaking is a cheap way to have therapy; it's like I get paid to have therapy."

The portrait of the South in Sling Blade feels more lived-in than the caricatured depictions marked by racist venom (A Time To Kill, The Chamber) or magnolia-scented gloss (Forrest Gump, The Grass Harp) that Hollywood filmmakers are accustomed to.

"There are probably things that are pretty foreign to them. It is full of colloquialisms in the language. I grew up in the woods. My grandparents and a lot of the people I was around talked that way. The look of it is very Southern. You can almost see the heavy air on the screen. I told the production designer, `I want this to look like Hoosiers, only a little more ugly. I like those colors, but don't make it that pretty.' "

Thornton says he avoids the extremes of gothicness or sentimentality because "I know the characters and don't vary from that. They are real as opposed to somebody's idea of the character. Southerners can be guilty of that too. I've heard Southern actors put on a phony Southern accent. That's not necessary. Just leave it alone and let it go."

Thornton apparently didn't have to try too hard to slip into the skin of Karl Childers, the abused, childlike, jut-jawed, homicidal antihero of Sling Blade. The character came to him a decade ago, when he was a struggling actor. "I was working on a crummy movie that I had a little nothing part in. I was broke at the time. I started talking to myself in the mirror about what a creep I was. I started making faces at myself. I made that Karl face and started talking in that voice. All of a sudden, I had this weird character. I did that monologue in the mirror that day. It just came out."

Karl's monologue, in which he talks about the killing that led to his institutionalization, was part of Thornton's one-man stage show for years. He filmed the monologue as a short piece entitled "Some Call It a Sling Blade," which became the opening sequence in Sling Blade, his feature-directing debut. The filmmaker surrounded himself with an unlikely cast, including John Ritter, with whom he'd starred on the sit-com Hearts Afire, as a lonely gay man who befriends fellow outcast Karl, and country-music hunk Dwight Yoakam as the beer-drinking macho man who becomes Karl's nemesis. Of Yoakam, Thornton says, "He's from Kentucky and Ohio, and I knew he'd understand this character, that he'd seen guys like this a thousand times. He's a very passionate person, and passion can be used in all kinds of directions. I knew he could use it to reach that level of, as he says in the movie, `assholishness.' "

Although he has a full slate of acting and writing projects ahead, Thornton doubts Sling Blade will bring him many offers or even the standard Oscar nomination that goes to leading actors playing mentally impaired characters. "I'll bet you that doesn't happen. They do tend to have the idea that characters like that are harder to play for actors, so the acting performance is worthy of an award because it's someone far away from you. But I've been doing this guy for so long that it's not so hard. Dustin [Hoffman] and Tom [Hanks] and those guys are not as close to their characters in real life as I am to this guy. I have a little of Karl in me. They're probably pretty stable guys."