Now Playing: Let the Whites of West Virginia Add Some Depravity to Your Holiday

Then there's ex-stripper Sue Bob, whose son faces prison time for shooting a man in the face -- twice -- before engaging the cops in an overnight standoff. And pregnant, pill-snorting Kirk, who counts her failure to land a knife blow in her ex-lover's neck among her biggest regrets. And Kirk's brother Derek, who introduces viewers to the "Boone County mating call" of rattled prescription drug bottles. And Mousey, who celebrates her release from prison by hunting down her estranged husband. And all of their own kids, of course, the new generation for whom vice and unacccountability are lessons as imperative as learning to count.

Nitzberg graphically outlines the Whites' lifestyle, an armed-and-dangerous 24/7 party that no outsiders dare cross. The director is especially hands-off, rolling tape on cocaine abuse in one corner of a room while toddlers frolic in the other. Car passengers swig beer, drug deals are enacted. In the film's most genuinely shocking sequence, Kirk hoovers lines of crushed painkillers while her hours-old infant daughter sleeps 10 feet away in a hospital bassinet. She'll later be claimed by the county's Child Protection Services, prompting Kirk to rehab.

And that only occurs after a family bender that pushes the film into its own hangover. While Whites possesses almost no narrative arc beyond its string of depraved vignettes, its first half does yield a robustly guilty novelty. Pop anthropologist Hank Williams III provides songs and commentary, and the Whites' frontiersman outrage is accessible and even affecting for a while. But their pathology of entitlement -- to government money, impunity, even invincibility -- catches up with the audience before it catches up with the family. Several Whites attribute that state of mind as a backlash to the exploitation of the state's coal industry, but even so, victims begetting victims is hardly grounds for folk heroism.

Not that they'd care anyway. "Coming into this world is nothing, going out is nothing," Mamie says in closing. "But at least the world knows who the f*ck we are." It's a vividly nihilistic counterpoint to the reality-TV era, or at least to a culture that handsomely rewarded Knoxville's Jackass crew for indulging its own taste for extremes. For this viewer at least, "exploitative, disgusting piece of shit" was as hearty a recommendation as they come. But wait and see if the reality -- more akin to "cruel, bipolar slice of life" -- isn't the one that makes or breaks this film's reputation.

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