‘The Killer Inside Me’ hits high points of the classic pulp novel

In fundamental ways, Michael Winterbottom’s film of “The Killer Inside Me” is not the Jim Thompson novel it’s based on.

Thompson’s book, published in 1952, is a shocking piece of pulp-level fiction — not shocking because of its violence, which is harsh, but because of its narrator’s attitude toward the rest of the world, the sarcastic contempt he has for the jerks and losers he sees around him.

And yet he maintains a bland, platitude-spouting personality toward everybody. Until he cracks apart and — well, see the title.

Winterbottom’s film is a serious and intelligent take on the material, but, except in fleeting moments, it can’t summon up that breathtaking disconnect. Except, perhaps, in this way: Although it is a dark-hearted movie about savagery, much of it takes place in classically composed images of a sunlit Texas town.

Central City, an oil town in the 1950s, is where Lou Ford (Casey Affleck) works as a deputy sheriff. He doesn’t need to carry a gun, because it’s not that kind of town — and the real law is not the sheriff’s office, but the local oil magnate (Ned Beatty) whose will prevails.

Lou’s placid demeanor, perfectly conveyed by the crack-voiced Affleck, is shaken when he takes up with a local prostitute (Jessica Alba), despite his apparently long-standing relationship with a pleasant local woman (Kate Hudson).

What follows is a blackmail scheme, various frame-ups, and murder. The murders take place at Lou’s hands, and a couple of them are so brutal they have already caused some controversy, sparked by walk-outs during the film’s screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.

(Interesting controversy: PG-13-rated movies go by with dozens of killings that contain no blood, no pain, and no emotion felt about the dead — and nobody blinks an eye. Two murders in this film, genuinely shocking killings of crafted characters who feel pain — and it’s a controversy about violence in cinema.)

Those murders are disturbing in the extreme, partly because the killer appears so calculating, almost apologetic. He has a goal in mind and the people are in the way of the goal, so he kills them.

Now that’s chilling. And the film is effective and well-acted Tom Bower is especially good as Lou’s boss.

You could say Casey Affleck is a revelation in the central role, except he already was revealed in “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” as a fascinating actor.

Even if it misses a layer of Thompson’s novel, this movie is strong. At its core, it’s about the deranging effects of leading a false life (Lou even hides his fondness for high culture, which would make him far more out-of-place in Central City than he already is), although this is admittedly more deranged than usual.