Billy the kid, oz-style.

Billy the kid, oz-style. A bandit legend from the outback. Ned Kelly Directed by Gregor Jordan As the Australian bandit of Ned Kelly, Heath Ledger at first seems miscast. He's tall, well-built and handsome, as we expect male movie stars to be, but something's off. Both figuratively and physically, he's a bit stiff. When he talks, he sounds overly considerate and formal, and he sounds as if he's pitching his voice a bit lower than it would normally be, to convey an illusion of maturity and authority. Like characters played by the young Warren Beatty, when Kelly speaks to groups of people, he fumbles his words and never seems to know quite what to do with his hands. He has the gut-first walk of a middle-aged farmer or rancher whose back has prematurely given out. Ledger's Kelly is either an old man in a young man's body or the reverse.

As un-movie-star-ish as Ledger's approach might seem, one comes to realize that nearly every choice the actor made was correct. The real-life Kelly was an Irish-born ex-convict who opposed police in a thoroughly stupid dispute (a cop with a crush on Kelly's sister started it; Kelly and his family escalated the tension by treating him as a bully rather than a cop). Then, through a series of confrontations and mishaps, Kelly ended up Australia's most notorious bank robber, cop killer and all-around menace. When all this happened, he was in his early twenties; he died at age 25. Ledger's performance acknowledges the extremes of Kelly's character: his wisdom and immaturity, his intelligence and impulsiveness, his righteousness and expediency. Unifying these extremes is Ledger's awareness that Kelly was simply not ready for the burdens he had to carry.

Kelly's tale is as familiar to Australians as Billy the Kid's story once was to Americans. (It has been told before, notably in a same-titled, far more pretentious 1970 movie by writer-director Tony Richardson, starring Mick Jagger as Kelly.) It's a criminal-as-folk-hero story about a man whose lawless deeds were excused and even celebrated by people from his own social class because Kelly dared thumb his nose at the ruling authority that lorded it over everyone.

Ledger, director Gregor Jordan and screenwriter John Michael McDonagh advance the characterization too fast, beginning with a flashback to Kelly's childhood and jumping to an incident in Kelly's adolescence, when he was imprisoned for beating a cop who accused him of stealing a horse he'd actually found in the woods. But they build Kelly's persona carefully from that point on, accounting for his childhood, life experience, ethnic roots and social class. (At one point, Kelly refers to himself as a "shitkicker's son.") The movie makes us aware of the Kelly family's grinding poverty (their tiny ranch house seems to contain more people than it should) and their continual oppression at the hands of police (many of whom, ironically and realistically, come from the same social class as the Kellys). McDonagh and his cinematographer Oliver Stapleton aren't afraid to put the camera far back to emphasize the hugeness of the countryside and the time it must have taken for anyone to get anywhere, on horseback or (god forbid) on foot. The filmmakers show Kelly doing strenous physical labor to survive, and they remind us, in beautiful and sometimes desolate wide shots, that in Australia 125 years ago, "law" was an abstraction, and so was "society." Even more so than today, people with money or guns told everybody else what to do.

This Ned Kelly is a working-class hero, and his fellow outlaws?whose ranks include his best pal Joe Byrne, hauntingly portrayed by sad-eyed Orlando Bloom?are a band of merry men. Jordan's previous credits include the uneven and ill-timed 2001 movie Buffalo Soldiers, a M*A*S*H-like black comedy about corrupt U.S. servicemen, the release of which was delayed by Sept. 11, Afghanistan and then Iraq. Ned Kelly is made in the same serious countercultural spirit. It's anti-authoritarian but not simplistic or vulgar. It takes the trouble to get to know the authority figures Kelly opposes (their ranks include Fitzpatrick, the cop who fancies Kelly's sister; he's well-played by Kiri Paramore of Flirting). And it doesn't indulge in the usual outlaw-movie moral cheat of assuming that because the audience empathizes with criminal heroes, the deaths of men who represent the state don't count. The strongest scene in Ned Kelly finds the hero trying to comfort a lawman he shot during a confrontation in the woods. The lawman cries that he has a family. Ashamed, Kelly tries to help the man, then realizes he's bleeding to death. "God forgive me," he says as he pulls the trigger.

Ned Kelly is a very good movie, but not a great one. Certain sequences are badly truncated, as if the producers were so determined to keep the running time down, they were willing to sacrifice emotional coherence. Kelly's antagonist, the police inspector Francis Hare (Geoffrey Rush), is too much a symbol of ruthless efficiency. Some of the dialogue is too on-the-nose, as in the scene near the end when Kelly's gang dons armor made of welded steel to face cops who've surrounded a roadside inn, and an old male customer says they look like "knights in shining armor." There's a certain amount of movie fluffery throughout?the scene in which Kelly defends his sister's honor, for example, or a later scene in which he forces a gang member to give back a personal item he stole from a bank patron. And there's a subplot involving Kelly's on-again, off-again fling with the dissatisfied wife of an English landowner, nicely but fruitlessly acted by Naomi Watts, which, according to the press notes, is the only major part of this movie that's completely made-up. (Is she there to reassure audiences that Kelly wasn't gay?)

The flaws seem minor compared to the movie's accomplishments. It's by turns sardonically funny, frightening and surreal, and its mix of Anglo-Saxon, Chinese and Aborigine faces reminds us that Australia's frontier period was as multicultural as ours. Ned Kelly is also a beautifully wrought film, the direction of which seems inspired equally by Terrence Malick and John Ford. You can sense Malick's presence in the film's many pointed images of nature, which suggest that the earth's flora and fauna are loftily indifferent to human suffering. An early, mood-setting montage features a spider in a web, a teeming anthill and a slow rack-focus through a skein of fern leaves; a montage later in the film depicting the aftermath of a shootout contains an unsettling wide shot of parakeets nosing around a corpse. Ford's influence can be sensed in the movie's meticulous compositions, particularly long shots and low angles filmed with short lenses that exaggerate perspective. Like Ford, Jordan is adept at arranging his actors so that the varying heights of their heads form diagonal lines that guide your eyes across the screen. Stapleton's amazing CinemaScope photography is bleached of color, to the point where it qualifies as what I call a stealth black-and-white film. Both director and cinematographer seem to have studied Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, Young Mr. Lincoln and other mid-career, b&w Ford classics. Their use of light is old-school, practically old Hollywood. The skies are often blown out. The outlines of trees and plants are fogged by the intense sun behind them (god's backlighting). In shots that are crowded with people, the filmmakers draw your eye to the most important character by pinging his face with just a bit more light than anyone else.

Like Spartan and the new Dawn of the Dead, Ned Kelly is popular entertainment that dares to be politically conscious. While it's not flat-out radical enough to inspire controversy, there are many images and lines that ask viewers to ponder the unequal and often arbitrary power relationship between citizens and a government composed of those same citizens. The movie also draws parallels between Kelly's gang and what would be called terrorists today. "These men have been identified as the leaders of a movement that threatens the stability of an entire country," says Hare. On the run from the law, Kelly muses in voice-over, "Living in caves, you learn something." The net effect is a movie intriguingly poised between Hollywood mythmaking and gritty realism, starring a refreshingly human-scaled legend.