Writer-director Patty Jenkins’ Monster, about hooker turned serial killer Aileen Wuornos, isn’t a great movie. But it’s made with craft and honesty, and it depicts truths about the southern American fringes (poor women especially) that some moviegoers (especially some film critics) would rather sneer at than contemplate.

Wuornos’ defense of her seven Florida murders was inconsistent throughout her trial and imprisonment. Mostly she claimed she was a victim of violence and sexism (and sexist violence) who finally snapped, visiting her wrath on at least one john who deserved it and more that didn’t. Her story will be familiar to those who’ve seen Nick Broomfield’s 1992 documentary Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer, an alternately self-aggrandizing and fascinating first-person recounting of the media’s exploitation of Wuornos. He made a sequel, the forthcoming Aileen: The Life and Death of a Serial Killer (which I haven’t seen yet) and provided research material to Jenkins, on the assumption that if there had to be a Hollywood movie about Wuornos, it might as well be a good one.

This is a good one. Aileen (Charlize Theron), a poor white drifter and drug user who was sexually abused as a child, supports herself as a prostitute, often picking up johns on interstate highways. Then she meets Selby Wall (Christina Ricci, likeable, if a tad unfocused), a pouty teen from out of state who was sent to Aileen’s community to live with religious relatives.

It’s lust at first sight. The scenes of Aileen skulking around Selby’s garage apartment have a Badlands feel, mixing innocence and cluelessness. Their first bonding occurs at a roller rink, where they flout their affections by skating arm-in-arm to Journey’s "Don’t Stop Believin’." Jenkins’ most daring romantic conceit occurs to make some quick cash for a new life with Selby. Aileen lets a john pick her up, only to endure a horrendously savage rape that ends with her shooting the john and burying his body, then showing up at Selby’s house hours later and apologizing with the half-assed furtiveness of a 70s Warren Beatty character. The sequence is notable for its unstinting depiction of rape as an act of ritual humiliation—a sexist’s preferred method of torturing women. Unlike Sam Peckinpah, Stanley Kubrick, Gaspar Noe and other violent male auteurs who’ve dealt with rape, Jenkins doesn’t put her leading lady on display or photograph the event in a titillating or sadistic manner. In this scene, and in the various murder scenes that follow, Jenkins shows only enough violence to communicate the ideas of cruelty and helplessness. Then she cuts away.

Equally bold (and unfashionable) is Jenkins’ and Theron’s portrayal of Aileen’s reasons for trying to survive the attack. According to Monster, Aileen doesn’t just want to escape the rape because it’s horrible and it might end with her death; she wants to escape because if she doesn’t escape, she will lose the chance to find out if Selby really was her true love.

Even though Monster understands the sentimental delusions of lovers, it refuses to sentimentalize the lovers themselves. Jenkins lets us know that each woman is, in a sense, using the other. From hooking to drinking, Aileen is forever giving herself permission to do things. When she meets Selby, she gives herself permission to better herself, which leads into the film’s alternately grim and touching second act, in which Aileen builds a crackpot domestic hideaway with Selby, who’s run away from her surrogate parents. When Aileen tries and fails to get a legitimate job, she gives herself permission to hook again, which leads her into situations that call up the same demons that were unleashed during her rape. Eager to be taken care of, and flattered by Aileen’s fierce love for her, Selby excuses Aileen’s first murder as self-defense, and tries to view the second, less defensible murder the same way. When Selby figures out that Aileen can’t support or protect her, the relationship sours, and a love story becomes an unrequited love story.

The film is being heralded mainly as a breakthrough for Theron, a statuesque blond South African who spent the last few years playing glorified arm candy in movies like The Cider House Rules, Reindeer Games and The Italian Job. Theron, who is credited here as a producer, had help from makeup specialists who fitted her with bad teeth, freckles and jowly/heavyset flesh. But her disappearance into the role should not be written off as a triumph of prosthetics. She taps a life force here that we haven’t seen before and conveys it through tics of body language, facial expression and regionally accurate slang (like a lot of hard- case women who came of age in the 60s and 70s, she calls everybody "man," including other women). She has a tomboyish swagger and often seems incapable of standing still. She’s like a handsome but uncouth, slightly heavy young guy who compensates for feelings of unattractiveness by trying to act cockier and talk louder than anyone else.

As Wuornos, Theron reminded me of De Niro—not the chameleon De Niro of Raging Bull and The Untouchables (although many critics reflexively made that comparison, presumably after reading press notes about the makeup), but the De Niro of Taxi Driver and Mean Streets. Like the young De Niro in those movies, Theron has a coiled energy that explodes in surprising ways, and she has a gift for dramatizing the hot-tempered, uneducated young American’s mindset: a mix of cunning, thickheadedness, thwarted bourgeoisie entitlement, and hypersensitivity to perceived slights—a Metro page story waiting to happen.

Despite the hype about this lead performance, Monster deserves praise as an honorable, small movie on a subject that, in other hands, might have been treated condescendingly. In the end, it is the critics who condescended. Laura Sinagra’s pan in the Village Voice was an East Coast college kid’s standup comedy routine, ridiculing Theron’s performance as "an award-grubbing po’ folk put on" and mocking her accurate South Florida accent as "an OxyContin-slurred drawl that would scare the banjo off the inbred Deliverance boy." John Anderson in Newsday said Theron sported "enough added heft to give her the edge in the Miss Jagermeister Contest at the next East Eubank Hot Rod and Roadkill Festival." Those seeking proof of the New York-based media’s knee-jerk hostility toward poor whites need look no further.

Calling Errol Morris a documentarian seems reductive. He doesn’t really "document" anything. He’s more like the cinema equivalent of a nonfiction essayist, working in a socially conscious, cosmic visionary vein that recalls Norman Mailer’s epic nonfiction ramblings in the 1960s and 70s. He conducts interviews via the Interrotron, a jury-rigged teleprompter that superimposes Morris’ own questioning face over a camera plate so that in the finished movie, interviewees seem to be talking directly to the viewer.

Then he intercuts the interview with footage that is often poetic or rhetorical rather than merely illustrative—a montage style more reminiscent of Oliver Stone than most documentarians. Morris is looking not just for facts (although he cares more for facts than many of his peers) but the indefinable energies that course beneath events, inspiring individuals to act in ways only they can understand and explain.

In The Fog of War, a portrait of former defense secretary Robert McNamara that might be an unofficial companion piece to Mailer’s Why We Are in Vietnam, Morris adopts a subjective approach, trying to visualize the subjective thought processes behind human decision. McNamara, a former Ford Motor Company president, brought his Mr. Spock-like version of corporate "logic" to America’s Vietnam policy. He reiterates points he made in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, admitting that America’s involvement in Southeast Asia was based on bad intelligence, false bravado, emotionalism, lies (particularly about the Gulf of Tonkin) and a naive refusal to recognize why our enemy continued to resist us. (They weren’t tools of the Russians or Chinese, but peasants who’d been resisting invaders for hundreds of years, and who at that particular moment just happened to be taking money and equipment from them. Morris’ potent images of dominoes toppling across a map of Asia underline the ideological assumptions behind Pentagon fears.)

The film has been praised as a valuable look back at failed foreign policies at a time when we appear to be in the early stages of a foreign adventure that will either rewrite received wisdom about military occupations or reinforce it. But The Fog of War is not a movie with a shelf life; it’s coolheaded, conceptual and far-reaching in its analysis. Nor is it a mouthpiece for McNamara, whose assertions are slyly undercut throughout the movie by Morris’ images. I suspect that like the 1965 agitprop classic The Battle of Algiers, which is due for theatrical re-release in January, The Fog of War focuses on specific events in a nation’s history in order to illustrate qualities that never change. It’s about an American, but more importantly, it’s about America.