John Sayles has one of the most bifurcated careers in Hollywood. As a screenwriter and script doctor, he’s turned his hand to horror, action, and space opera, but largely as a means to fund independent films that he can write and direct on his own terms. He established his modus operandi early: in 1980, he used the money he’d earned writing scripts for Roger Corman-produced cheapo B movies to fund his own independent film, Return of the Secaucus 7, a drama about 1960s college activist friends reuniting years later at a very different point in their lives and in American history. 

Sayles’s 1996 film Lone Star is one of his independents, but it’s got traces of genre movie in its DNA. I instinctively reach to call it a western, but it’s more like the aftermath of one. Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) is the sheriff of a small town in Texas on the U.S.-Mexico border who has been elected almost entirely because his late father, Buddy Deeds (played in flashbacks by Matthew McConaughey), was sheriff before him. For most of the town, Buddy is a beloved figure who has already entered into myth. The local courthouse is being renamed in his honor, and apart from a smattering of detractors citing Buddy’s corruption, the renaming seems to have cross-community support. This is a diverse town, one in which Anglos (white people) are now outnumbered collectively by Tejano (Mexican), Black, and Native inhabitants. They all buy into the folktale of Buddy Deeds—it might be the only thing they agree on. But it can be tweaked just a little for one’s own purposes: both racists and people of color imagine him as their ally. 

But Sam doesn’t buy in. He resents his father not just for the shadow he casts but for forcing him apart from his high school sweetheart Pilar (Elizabeth Peña), who now works as a schoolteacher and gets scolded at school board meetings for teaching more than one way of remembering the Alamo. Even after not seeing each other for all these years, Sam and Pilar are drawn to each other as if their love were written in the stars. Their separation is, you assume, what gives Sam the ability to see beyond the heroic image of Buddy Deeds. And when a skeleton is discovered on an old army shooting range, decades old and accompanied by a Freemason ring and a sheriff’s badge, Sam investigates when everyone around him seems to want it left alone. 

The foundation of the Buddy Deeds myth is a story that Mayor Hollis (Clifton James) tells and retells: one night in 1957, Buddy stood up to then-sheriff Charlie Wade, a corrupt and violent man played by Kris Kristofferson with the brazen, blood-chilling coldness of one who knows himself to be untouchable. After Buddy stood up to him, Charlie Wade disappeared. He just left, so the story goes, with money from the public coffers in his back pocket. But when Sam discovers that the skeleton is Wade’s, he’s pretty sure his father murdered him. He just has to prove it. 

You expect that the film will deconstruct the story of Buddy being a great hero, revealing his true villainy. And for a while, it does play out that way. An opponent of the courthouse renaming says that Buddy manipulated planning laws to increase the value of his property, but more revealing than criticism is the praise: a bartender says that Buddy would have gotten the Black couple sitting in his bar to move along. But the deconstruction of the myth of Buddy Deeds soon doubles over itself, deconstructing Buddy as a villain, too: Sam has built up a narrative around Buddy just like the townspeople have, but from another side. The truth of him—of this town, of history, of Texas, of America—is so much messier and more complicated and more painful than a black-and-white distinction could account for. But so many people attempt to force those distinctions anyway. That’s what the border is there for: this unnatural dividing line drawn on a map just to make people criminals for crossing it. 

“One of the things that Lone Star is about, to me, is the way in which American culture has always, always been many cultures. As in many places, the dominant culture gets to write the history,” John Sayles said in an interview in 1996. “The Mexican border wasn’t even closed until about 1930. Mexicans could come into the United States and work and go back and there was no border patrol.” He goes on, “One of the reasons I was interested in setting this movie on the border is that here is this arbitrary, artificial line.” 

Lone Star captures the basic absurdity of the Texas-Mexico border and its militarization by destabilizing the ahistorical assumption that Spanish speakers in the U.S. are immigrants or even descended from immigrants. Their community has existed on both sides of the present-day border long before there was such a thing as Texas. But the longer the border exists, the more engrained it becomes in how communities and cultures imagine themselves: we see Pilar’s mother as a slip of a girl cross the Rio Grande, and decades later, we see her complain about the “wetbacks” working at her restaurant. 

The unearthing of Buddy Deeds is the narrative throughline of Lone Star, but it’s an ensemble movie in which even one-scene actors feel like they’re the protagonist of their own story. It would seem sprawling if it wasn’t all so tangled together: in a town this small, even the most apparently disparate lives are intimately entwined. The newly stationed colonel at the army base is the estranged son of the Black bar owner who covers his walls with images of Black and Native cowboys. It’s not a melting pot, but God, it could be. Not when Charlie Wade was sheriff; he was an open, violent white supremacist who shot people of color at traffic stops. And not when Buddy Deeds was sheriff, either: he exploited, even reinforced, de facto racial segregation to serve his own interests, even if he did it in a genial fashion that left most people thinking of him as their ally. 

Illustration by John Biggs

You expect Sam to expose Buddy as a murderer. But, if I may spoil the final act twist, what should be his most damning sin is peeled away to reveal a covert nobility. But it doesn’t feel like truth and beauty and goodness cutting through the horror around it—it’s a gut punch. We’ve seen Mayor Hollis in flashbacks as sheriff’s deputy, clearly uncomfortable with Charlie Wade’s way of doing things but not so much as to say a word about it. But when Wade was about to murder Otis, the Black bar owner, Hollis shot Wade before he could. That’s when Buddy arrived. The three of them cooked up the story about Wade leaving town, the story that the legend of Buddy Deeds was built on. It’s a reveal that calls to mind the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But the characters must live with the consequences of the truth regardless of whatever legends you print. 

Here's the truth that Sam and Pilar have to live with, can’t ever unknow: during Sam’s investigation, he finds out that Buddy was Pilar’s father, too. This decades-long cosmic pull between them isn’t that of soulmates, it’s that of siblings. Their parents had good reasons to keep them apart, even though they messed it all up worse. Sam and Pilar still want to be together, despite it all—“Forget the Alamo,” Pilar says. But there is no real forgetting. We are doomed to live in the context of history, unable to pick and choose what makes up the truth—unless, like Buddy Deeds, we transcend to become stories.