Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

While, as a musician, I enjoyed many of the performances, I found this to be an entirely off-base depiction of the American south. Born and raised in Nashville, TN, I have "ventured off the highway ten miles" many times in Tennessee and never found anyone resembling the mythical southerners depicted in this film. My mother's family has lived in Tennessee for around two hundred years, and of the many stories I have heard about Tennessee as it was seventy-five years ago, I have heard only of intelligent, hard-working people who lived in small-towns, attended church regularly, often went to college out-of-state, drove cars, had electricity, were respectful of their spouses, and did not speak in tongues or pass snakes around on Sundays. These were not the richest of Southerners, they were just average Southerners. The South depicted in this film died with the founding of the TVA, if it hadn't died prior, and frankly it disgusts me that people from Canada and elsewhere are viewing this film and thinking that is at all an accurate depiction of the South.I currently live in Franklin County, TN, and even poorer southerners who live in cities like Cowan or Decherd do not resemble in the slightest the extreme versions of Southerns found in this film, so if planning a trip to the south to see the southerners sitting on their front porch playing a banjo with a hound dog next to them, save yourself plane fare and don't bother.

Strongly recommended. I would ruminate, based on close examination of my late grandmother, that there's a ragged wound in the center of all white Southerners still oozing over the unrepentant evil of slavery. Nowadays, that would manifest as what Jim White calls in 'Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus,' "a loneliness for God," a vague dread that nothing can ever really be made right in this world. Add to this, the muttered self-loathing of all rural, poor America, stumbling the parapet between fundamentalism and crystal meth. The South is just more lyrically insane than Nebraska. To this special purpose, some call the songs of White, Johnny Dowd, and Brett and Rennie Sparks (all whom perform splendidly in the movie) 'Gothic,' but Amazon files it under 'Americana,' with Twain, with Bierce, and with Gee's Bend, Alabama, an appellation more honest and, in the end, the proper place for this movie.

Grew up in similar places, but its a bit skewed. Don't really think you can get the whole of the South by going to a prison, some roadside bars and some Pentecostal churches. Its basically rubbernecking anthropology, searching for and finding the extreme without bothering to mention that it is the extreme... Not every southerner is poor, or has to either be a holy-roller or a heathen. Southerners generally are more religious than the norm, but for every Pentecostal, you'll find a baptist, Methodist and a Church of Christ patron that isn't nearly as eclectic and thinks the Pentecostals are a little weird too.But I've never been all that bothered by the Southern stereotypes (they are sort of true) so beyond that, a real entertaining film.

This was definitely the most intriguing documentary I have seen in years. While it deals with the obvious issues facing the sometimes impoverished South, it's subtext is poignant and beautifully haunting. I felt swept away into a world so strange, and somehow peaceful in it's harshness. Jim White, the films narrator, and musical contributor, seems to be a wise man with much to teach in his portrayal of religion and human nature, not to mention his amazing bluegrass melodies and guitar whines. This soundtrack is amazing! Rootsy and real and rich with history. See this doc if you are interested in our multi faceted world with it's many dark secrets, beautiful truths, religion and spirituality found in every shadow. You just need to look.