‘Blood for Dust’ puts Billings in as good a light as a crime thriller can

The opening shot is just delicious, a blood-soaked and lovingly corny amuse-bouche for a blood-soaked and lovingly corny movie.

It opens tight on a photo sitting on a desk. It’s a portrait of a white bread, cookie cutter family. There’s two young kids, a beautiful wife and a father in a Navy uniform. Then a gunshot rings out and the family portrait is splattered in blood. The camera slowly zooms out and a body is revealed to be sitting at the desk, shotgun at his feet. There’s brain matter smeared across the back of his head, and blood drips down the wall.

And then something funny happens. A title card appears on screen: “Boise, Idaho: 1989.”

Except, no it’s not. That’s the wall in Gazette publisher Dave Worstell’s office. Peer through the semi-closed blinds in the scene and maybe you can see my red Subaru in the parking lot. Right before the camera started rolling, the guy with half his head missing was just milling about in the lobby, trying (and failing) to blend in. They spent that whole day shooting in the Gazette office, with employees standing in as extras.

But here’s the thing. For almost everyone in the world, that office is anonymous. It could be anywhere. You’d only recognize that office if you’re like me, and are there five — sometimes six — days a week. For everyone else who sees this movie, it’s just an office.

That’s the experience of watching “Blood for Dust” — which I did Friday night as part of the Montana Film Festival at the Roxy Theatre Missoula, along with a sold out crowd and, confoundingly, a crying baby — if you’re from Billings. It’s like seeing a movie from both sides of the camera at once.

The indie thriller, which is still making the festival rounds after a premier at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival back in June. The Missoula date was its Montana premiere. And that’s fitting, since it was entirely shot in and around Billings last November and December. The script originally called for the film to be set in Texas, with the high plains of eastern Montana standing in for their counterparts on the Llano Estacado.

But it’s hard to do a film shoot in Montana in the winter and pretend you’re anywhere else. Although “Blood for Dust” does have some issues with Montana geography. Both Baker and Grass Range are mentioned as stops on I-90, and one character says they’re headed to “Kally-spell.” The whole thing was shot in Billings and Laurel, with some exteriors around Red Lodge, but the script hops around Montana and the mountain west, with stops in Missoula and Great Falls.

All of this, by the way, is fine. That’s what movies do. They’re not meant to be exact portraits of place. Rod Blackhurst, who directed and co-wrote “Blood for Dust” said as much in an intro that rolled before the Missoula showing.

“Please don’t hold (geographical inconsistencies) against us, we’re just doing some movie magic,” he said.

And he’s right, because even if he isn’t totally sure where Dickinson, SD is, Blackhurst seems to have a handle on Montana. He doesn’t shoot the place like a painting, full of mountains and endless skies. It’s real. The snow that covers everything in “Blood for Dust” isn’t the newly fallen stuff. It’s old and windswept, trod over and mashed. The powder in the streets has been driven over so much that nobody bothered to plow it, and now it’s a compacted sort of ice.

Plus, it’s fascinating to see a movie like this, where you can see the cracks. How many movies have I watched before that use the same location as different places and never noticed? The only reason I noticed this time is because said location is the Dude Rancher Lodge. You don’t want to see how the sausage gets made, they say, but sometimes you do. Especially if it’s pretty good sausage.

As it turns out, “Blood for Dust” is pretty good sausage.

Blackhurt’s biggest credits are a pair of true crime documentary miniseries: “Amanda Knox” and “John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise.” That makes sense, because this guy is an expert at capturing the casual horror of the every day, filled with cheap hotels, half-fabricated homes and empty offices. Other than a score that sounds like the “Psycho” theme being played by someone falling down a flight of stairs, “Blood for Dust” roars with the constant low hum of breaking down automobiles and the whir of machinery. The gunshots echo like thunderbolts. There have been literal depictions of hell that feel less demonic than the “Blood for Dust’s” strip club, a rotten place where you can get female attention, a hamburger, or involved in a drug running scheme.

That’s what happens to Cliff (Scoot McNairy, one of the greatest character actors alive absolutely relishing a leading part), a traveling salesman stuck in a dead end job and a dead end life. He’s not a deadbeat, per se, he’s just the type of zombie that life turns many of us into. “Blood for Dust” is set in the early 1990s, but its themes feel pretty contemporary. Then again, those themes, about the crumbling American dream and the lengths desperate men go to to achieve it, would be as at home in 1923 as they are in 2023.

Cliff is chowing down on his strip joint burger when he reunites with Ricky (Kit Harington, the former “Game of Thrones” star who, even out of Westeros, is still terrorizing people in the snow). The pair were involved in some sort of nefarious scheme together. Details are sketchy, but they shot a throwback scene of a crime gone wrong in the Gazette building. It ends with Ricky cursing up a storm and throwing a keyboard, an easy thing to remember since the broken keys became prized collectibles for Gazette employees who stuck around to watch the shoot.

Ricky has a job proposal for Cliff. Just run some drugs across the North Dakota border and drop them just on the other side. No problem. Easy stuff.

“I’m afraid to ask if any of this is legal,” Cliff murmurs.

“Then don’t ask,” Ricky shoots back.

Before leaving, Cliff is threatened by the mob boss he’s working for (Josh Lucas, great in a tiny role, his romcom good looks obscured by facial hair and grime), and accompanied on the trip by a thug named Slim (Ethan Suplee, a hulking actor who looks like a thumb with hair). If you can believe it, things don’t exactly go as planned.

This of course isn’t the first big Hollywood production to hit Billings. In one “Blood for Dust” shot, when the Ricky and Cliff head to the gang’s headquarters, housed in the Big Sky VCR building, the camera lingers on the Montana Avenue sign. It’s probably not, but it feels like a knowing wink to 2013’s “Nebraska,” where Alexander Payne memorably let his camera gaze onto the L.P. Anderson Tire mascot while Bruce Dern walks down that same avenue.

But “Blood for Dust” really gets something about Montana. So you can excuse its occasional lapses. And if you’re not from Billings, it’s doubtful you’ll will notice.

Case in point, during one scene, a Missoula location title card pops up. And everyone in the theater cheered. Except that scene wasn’t shot in Missoula, it’s in the Planet Lockwood casino and strip club. Sometimes, it’s just nice to be noticed at all.