Ben Foster and Melissa Leo in Opioid Thriller

The shadow of Steven Soderbergh’s 2000 drug war classic, Traffic, hangs heavily over all the narcs, cartel members, native gangsters and fentanyl addicts populating director John Swab’s hard-nosed thriller, King Ivory. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Taking cues from a modern classic that depicted the battle to stop crack-cocaine from destroying America, Swab repeats the same structure over two decades later to tackle the opioid epidemic, and generally achieves strong results. Less dramatic and poetic than the Soderbergh film, King Ivory nonetheless boasts some harrowingly real action sequences, tough-as-nails characters and an overall level of grittiness that demands attention. Its uncompromisingly bleak view of fentanyl’s damaging hold on the U.S. is not necessarily a crowd-pleaser, but it well deserves a look.

Swab cut his chops directing genre flicks like Ida Red and Candy Land, putting out a whopping seven features since 2019. (He’s already releasing another movie, the $20 million actioner Long Gone Heroes, later this month.) His raw aesthetic and predilection for social outcasts — Candy Land was about a group of truck-stop sex workers known as “lot lizards” — lends his work a grindhouse sheen, which he applies here to a more seriously documented story about the impact of fentanyl on Tulsa, Oklahoma.

King Ivory, whose title is taken from one of the drug’s many street names, hits the ground running and doesn’t let up until the last shots are fired. The handheld cinematography of DP Will Stone and fast-paced editing by Andrew Aarronson keep things forever on the move, which can be a bit disorienting in the film’s early stages. But eventually the viewer more or less grasps the many conflicts at play, which have everything to do with a highly addictive opiate that’s easy to manufacture, transport and dish out.

Swab certainly knows his way around the drug. In a confession that’s extremely rare to find in press notes for a movie, the director admits to shooting fentanyl back in 2015, when he was an addict himself. And while he’s been clean for nine years, the experience clearly helped lend a verisimilitude to all the scenes of dependence and getting high.

Those freebasing sequences, of which there are several, involve a hunky high school student, Jack (Jasper Jones), who gets hooked on fentanyl thanks to his girlfriend, Colby (Kaylee Curry). As it turns out, Jack’s dad, Layne (James Badge Dale), is a narcotics officer fighting each day to get the drug off the streets. Along with his partner, Ty (George Carroll), Layne uses bare-knuckle tactics that seem closer to those of a U.S. Marine than to those of a cop, as evidenced in an opening shootout where the bullets really fly.

But there’s a war out there in Tulsa, whose lucrative drug trade is not being overseen by the usual cartel, but by a native tribe chief (Graham Greene) who runs the Indian Brotherhood from a state penitentiary. It’s behind bars that he enlists fellow convict Smiley (Ben Foster) to pull off some fast murders before getting released. Once out, Smiley reteams with his uncle, Mickey, played by British actor Ritchie Coster in an absolutely gonzo version of an Irish redneck, to help the tribe take out local rivals.

The characters and plot-points are sketched so quickly they’re not always easy to follow, and it takes quite a while to figure out who’s exactly working for who, and how. But the gritty, kinetic energy of Swab’s filmmaking, as well as his desire to capture a sleazy and altogether dreary version of contemporary Tulsa, help compensate for some of the looser storytelling.

A third viewpoint is added when Swab introduces the Mexican side, where fentanyl is cheaply manufactured and clandestinely shipped by cartels into the U.S. The two key players there are Ramon Gázra (Michael Mando, who memorably played a narco on Better Call Saul) and a young man named Lago (David De La Barcena), who gets smuggled over the border to work as a dealer, making DoorDash-style deliveries to needy addicts.

The sprawl and scope of Swab’s effort is impressive, but it’s also a bit unwieldy. Some scenes feel ripped from real life, while others are too movie-ish, using dialogue that sounds like pure genre fodder. The performances aren’t always even, either, although there’s a freakish lived-in quality to them that can’t be ignored. Foster is especially good as an ice-cold killer forced to communicate through a tracheostomy tube, while Melissa Leo — playing Smiley’s wacko mom — offers up both levity and gravitas at the same time, especially in a scene when she performs illegal surgery on Ramon.

Even more memorable are the handful of set-pieces that follow Layne and his fellow cops trying to take down the bad guys. One of them takes place in a supermarket packed with customers and illuminated by bright fluorescents, which better reveal the gruesomeness of what eventually happens. Another occurs just before the end, involving a motel shootout that gets so violent and out of hand, it looks like a scene from an Iraq War movie.

It’s definitely an over-the-top finale, and not everything ultimately seems real in King Ivory. But what makes Swab’s latest rise above your average drug thriller is how he tries to make each moment at least feel like it’s been drawn from a certain reality. The portrait he paints of the fentanyl plague currently sweeping the country is an ugly one indeed, and that was clearly the director’s intention. Even the film’s one or two glimmers of hope, which only leap out at the very end, feel like mere mirages in a desert of drugs and American decline.