Review: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' is an exuberant mix of genres made wonderful by Matthew McConaughey and newcomer Angelina LookingGlass

It’s difficult to get a handle on what kind of movie “The Rivals of Amziah King” is — part musical hang-out movie, part heist caper, part revenge thriller — but easy to love it, because director Andrew Patterson blends ideas so seamlessly and provides Matthew McConaughey with one of his best roles in years.

McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper who spends his days tending to his hives and his nights playing bluegrass music with his friends wherever they gather — at someone’s home, at the church potluck or outside a drive-in burger joint. 

It’s at Ulysses’ Drive-In where Det. Sunderland (Bruce Davis) finds Amziah, and asks for help solving a mystery. Sunderland has seized barrels of stolen honey, and he wants Amziah’s expertise to identify where they came from. Amziah goes to work in his honey plant, with help from a former employee, Remick (Jake Horowitz). Remick brings along a buddy, Colemar (Tony Revolori), who gets his ponytail caught in Amziah’s honey extraction machine — which results in a moment of bloody comedy in which Amziah and his friends rush Colemar to a hospital to get his scalp reattached.

Amziah’s default mode is energized zen — acting quickly and decisively when needed, but with a laidback attitude that seems pitched perfectly to McConaughey’s “alright, alright” screen persona. In the movie’s first hour, we pick up hints of hard times in Amziah’s younger days, losing his wife to cancer and going through financial struggles with his beekeeping operation. He also mentions casually, in an important bit of foreshadowing, that the honey business “is not full of kind people.”

When Amziah stops at a diner for coffee, he sees that his waitress is a familiar face: Kateri (played by Angelina LookingGlass), for whom Amziah and his wife once served as foster parents. Amziah brings Kateri along to the potluck, where he walks her through the different dishes and teaches her “there’s truth and there’s lies” in what’s served. McConaughey is having a ball chewing through writer James Montague’s dialogue, just as much as he enjoys breaking into song with his pals.

Amziah brings Kateri under his wing, teaching her how the honey business works. Amziah tells her about the three types of bees — the drones, the workers and the queen — and how a bee colony is like a community, where the bees look after each other to ensure their mutual survival. Kateri quickly learns that the community of Amziah’s friends work the same way in their Southern town. (The movie was filmed in Alabama and Oklahoma.)

For the first hour of a movie that’s slightly over two hours long, Patterson — who made a powerful debut with his 2020 radio-based supernatural thriller “The Vast of Night” — introduces us to Amziah and this community, and shows how welcome Kateri becomes. It’s such a pleasant place to visit, with food and music and camaraderie in generous amounts, that you scarcely notice that the plot hasn’t really kicked in. Then it does, with pivotal events for Amziah and his bees that put Kateri on a path toward justice and maybe some revenge.

Amziah’s friends — including Remick, the heavily accented Timmy (Scott Shepherd) and Amziah’s lawyer Rippy (Rob Morgan) — provide Kateri with support and guidance. She’ll need it, because she’s up against a ruthless agriculture tycoon, Dob McCoy (Kurt Russell). 

In a movie loaded with treasures, including a bluegrass soundtrack co-produced by the legendary T-Bone Burnett and featuring the Avett Brothers, McConaughey’s performance is an all-timer. He plays Amziah as a man holding his regrets but not weighed down by them, looking at life with a battered but still open heart. You’d have to go back a decade or more, maybe to “Interstellar” or “Magic Mike,” to find him in better form.

One of the wisest things McConaughey and Patterson do in “The Rivals of Amziah King” is to transfer the dramatic load to young LookingGlass, who makes a compelling movie debut. (She’s an Indigenous actor, with a recurring role last season in “Dark Winds.”) LookingGlass doesn’t say a lot, but within her stillness is a fire that fuels Kateri’s drive to make right what’s gone wrong. 

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‘The Rivals of Amziah King’

★★★★

Opens Friday, August 14, in theaters. Rated R for language and some grisly images. Running time: 130 minutes.