ELVIS IS EVERYWHERE: Gael García Bernal as The King's King.

That would be Pastor Sandow (William Hurt), first appearing on stage, where he introduces his flock's "newest members," a lineup of babies carried by their smiling, Stepfordy moms. An erstwhile loser who once "used" women and paid them, Sandow is now a self-righteous, uptight preacher in Corpus Christi. His congregation is dedicated (they leave prayer requests in a box at night), his property tidy (the freshly mowed lawn is adorned by a cross-shaped sign with a neon crawl announcing themes and schedules). "Let God's love flow through you," Sandow instructs his people, the camera panning their pale, pinkish faces, placid and receptive.

When Elvis arrives, his newly purchased 1969 Mercury Cougar seeming to float in Sandow's rearview mirror, the pastor is shocked. "It was a long time ago," he says of Elvis' mother, before he became a Christian. And right now is "an inconvenient time," he sputters, suggesting Elvis call him later, so they can "set up a time to meet and talk properly." As if to show his son what he'd be disrupting, Sandow introduces his family, perched on their seats in his SUV: zealous wife Twyla (Laura Harring), aspiring preacher son Paul (Paul Dano) and quietly rebellious daughter Malerie (Pell James). She smiles from the backseat, one up on her dad, as she's already met Elvis before the prayer service, and he's already told her she's beautiful.

While the most obvious reading of Elvis has him playing a more or less classic spoiler, the brown-skinned sign of past sins come back to trouble the complacent white man, The King isn't quite so simple as that. Elvis' vengeance seems more accidental than well-considered, as if he's an embodiment of stagy retribution rather than a character. At the same time, his seduction of Malerie occurs in small, cliched steps: he offers to show her his car, performs cunnilingus in her bedroom while her parents are slumbering down the hall, and displays his Navy rifle drill with some pride (the fact that he's kept his weapon, of course, bodes ill).

At the same time, Malerie has her own reasons to seek escape from her father. Unlike her silently seething mother, she resists his essentialist vision of men and women, a vision passed on to his son; when dad and Paul hunt deer with crossbows, Malerie's assigned to skin the catch, then clean up the blood off the garage floor, her mop slamming at the red splotches as Paul puts away his weapon, warning her not to touch it. The glare she shoots him explains more than any other moment in the movie. When she sneaks out of her home at night, a smudge of her mother's red lipstick on her mouth, she's less interested in Elvis per se than in the options she might have discovered, a way not to be Twyla, to reject her father on the sly.

As much as Malerie's story recalls other rebellious movie girls (not least being Badlands' Holly, with whom she shares a naive, father-delivered morality), her brother also echoes any number of boys with faith in their fathers. (And here, Elvis' own rudimentary faith becomes a perverse and logical permutation.) Paul's sense of entitlement shapes his determination to "protect" his sister and his destiny.

Scheduled to go to Bible college in the fall, he drives his shiny new graduation-present car around town even as he continues in his effort to bring intelligent design into his high school's science curriculum. When he and his group are ridiculed by classmates and turned down by the school board, he's unflustered, secure in his knowledge that such persecution signals his rightness. And that's the trouble for the myopic boys in The King: they only see the worlds built for them.

The King

Directed by James Marsh A ThinkFilm release Opens Friday at Ritz Five