Sometimes, a movie comes along that appears to take the H.O.V. lane through the awards circuit. It gets a bunch of nominations and wins some big prizes, occasionally the biggest ones, and most of the time, people — moviegoers, moviemakers, movie critics — will say they didn’t see it coming, that the enthusiasm for this movie doesn’t make any sense, that the praise being slathered insults how good about a dozen other movies actually are. Nonetheless, the movie is even kind of a hit. In its own accidental way, it does seem to be saying something about, you know, now. And the more love the prize givers throw at it, the more some people want to throw themselves off a cliff.

Last year, that movie was “La La Land.” Two years before that, it was arguably — suddenly — “American Sniper” (winner of nothing especially big, but big in the meaning we ascribed it). In 2005, it was “Crash.” This year, the entrant is “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” The movie won four Golden Globes, including best drama, making it a contentious Oscar favorite (the nominations come our way Jan. 23.)

“Three Billboards” is about a mother determined to humiliate and harass a small-town police force into solving the months-old rape and murder of her teenage daughter. Frances McDormand plays the woman — her name is Mildred Hayes — and the billboards are the site of her campaign. “Raped while dying,” reads one. “And still no arrests,” read another. “How come, Chief Willoughby?” asks the last.

What’s got people arguing is whether the movie is convincingly about America (Ebbing is as real a place as Narnia) and whether this movie about America ought to be, say, redeeming one of the racist cops serving and protecting Ebbing. Of course, anybody who loves “Crash” already knows the answer to that one — “Why not!”

The reason to do any barking — well, the reason for me — is that “Three Billboards” feels so off about so many things. It’s one of those movies that really do think they’re saying something profound about human nature and injustice. It’s set in the country’s geographical middle, which should trigger a metaphor alert. We’re talking about the sort of heartland populated by average-looking people meant to be made poetically interesting by their exotic brides (from Australia!), dying words (“Oscar Wilde”) and symbolically sadistic late-night film taste (one vindictive woman who isn’t Mildred is glued to “Don’t Look Now”). Individually, not one of these choices qualifies as a disaster. But they’re conflated here in a way that achieves a grating otherworldliness.

This is a revenge movie that’s also a dead-child tragedy that’s also a local-law-enforcement comedy that leaves room for physical comedy, cancer and a bad date. Someone is thrown from a window. Somebody else smashes through one while on fire. And Mildred seems desperate to believe in the power of the billboards as a shaming vehicle for justice. Meanwhile, the issues of the day come and go: brutal police, sexual predators, targeted advertising. It’s like a set of postcards from a Martian lured to America by a cable news ticker and by rumors of how easily flattered and provoked we are.

The Martian is actually Martin McDonagh, a playwright from the U.K. “Three Billboards” is his third movie (“In Bruges” and “Seven Psychopaths” precede this one), and the second set in the United States. He’s a dramatist and a linguist who can be glorious about the ordinariness and misery of duty and work. His plays — like “The Beauty Queen of Leenane” or “The Cripple of Inishmaan” — tether behavior to state of mind. You believe what people do because they appear to be making the choices — ugly ones — as opposed to an author you can picture yanking the strings.

But his movies are all strings. Often they feel as if other filmmakers are doing the pulling. “In Bruges” featured two hit men on a chatty stroll in Belgium, and certain people’s passion for it is fit for Valentine’s Day. But it was Tupperware Tarantino to me.

To “Three Billboards” admirers and to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the outfit that hands out the Golden Globes, something about the movie rings true or feels timely. That presumption of truth is driving some of the annoyance over this movie. My favorite bad thing about “Three Billboards” is its ambition to play around with America’s ideological and geographical toys.

One of the toys is the word “n*gg*r.” Another is the concept of political correctness. There’s a scene between Mildred and a hotheaded dimwit cop — the racist — named Jason (Sam Rockwell), in which she baits his racism by calling him a “n*gg*r torturer.” He hits the roof. “Person-of-color-torturing” is what Jason says you must call it now, with exasperated lament. They volley the word and poke fun at its impropriety. You can tell that Mr. McDonagh relished the application of absurdism to the political correction (he knows “person-of-color-torturing” really is linguistic torture, maybe even for a person of color). But he also seems to like the loaded nonsense in the sound of the word “n*gg*r.” What you hear in a scene like this is a kind of careless virtuosity. It’s a fun scene that’s sunk by how much fun it’s having with things you’re not supposed to have fun with. The whole movie is like that — it’s like Mildred — rude for sport and proud of it.

There’s certainly a place for a white artist to poke, laughingly, at our racial and class messes. (Mel Brooks, for instance, excelled at it.) But Mr. McDonagh doesn’t want to do more than poke. The Danish director Lars von Trier tried a more explicit damnation of the United States with “Dogville” (2003) and “Manderlay” (2005). But I liked the nihilism in Mr. von Trier’s respective approximations of racism and slavery, even if he followed a European habit, especially in documentaries, of diagnosing America’s ills in the least surprising and most patronizing way.

For a movie that asks you to behold so much violence — defenestration and talk of rape, a bludgeoning, a suicide, charred skin, a dental drill that treats a thumb like drywall — “Three Billboards” feels weirdly benign. Its black comedy doesn’t leave a bruise. The violence curdles into the cartoonish. The movie could be about grace and vengeance, but they’re presented as hoary lessons and hokey contrivances — happening upon a deer, sharing your orange juice with the madman who tried to murder you, juxtaposing the reading of an inspirational letter with an inferno. There’s no reckoning with anything, no introspection, just escalating mayhem. The mix of the silly and the serious puts the movie in Coen brothers territory. But they can adjust the settings for their cynicism. Even at their worst, they’ve got their finesse. Mr. McDonagh just keeps bashing away.

This really is an action movie whose action is played for laughs. Mildred beats up teenagers and tells off priests. Her precision with a Molotov cocktail should land her in the Super Bowl. Ms. McDormand certainly makes the most of the tirade machine Mr. McDonagh has built for her. (Not since “Erin Brockovich” has anybody gotten to tell off this many people with this much gusto.) You feel for Mildred, but you fear her more. When she approaches a table in a restaurant carrying a wine bottle, the audience practically begs her not to use it. By this point, Mildred is way past being a mad mommy. She’s Charles Bronson.

But she’s not the only bereft mother fueled by vengeance. The foreign language Golden Globe went, in a surprise, to Fatih Akin’s “In the Fade,” which has Diane Kruger as a white German who must endure the legal trial of the neo-Nazi terrorists who killed her Turkish-German husband and their young son. It’s doesn’t rank up there with “Head-On” (2004) and “The Edge of Heaven” (2007), Mr. Akin’s masterwork melodramas. It’s too well oiled a machine, too morally simple to be completely satisfying. But it’s more clear-eyed and serious than “Three Billboards” about what it means to inflict pain. Maybe there’s a way to laugh through rage, but Mr. Akin doesn’t know what way that would be. Neither, I would argue, does Mr. McDonagh.

“Three Billboards” is a cupcake rolled in glass. It all just feels off. The redemption of the racist cop doesn’t bother me — Sam Rockwell studiously plays him as a dangerous dope. But the way two other black characters (Amanda Warren and Darrell Britt-Gibson) and a smitten dwarf (Peter Dinklage) bop around Mildred is almost Muppet-like. (Mr. Dinklage’s stature is meant to be a source of unapologetic amusement. More stuff you’re not supposed to have fun with!)

Eventually, the film introduces a temporary black police chief (Clarke Peters) who seems meant to draw out — Sidney Poitier-style — some of the bigotry coursing through town, or at least through the precinct. But he’s as much a prop as one of the billboards.

I thought a lot about this movie watching “American Vandal,” an eight-part, sitcom-length show created by Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda, on Netflix. It parodies the true-crime boomlet epitomized by “The Jinx” on HBO, “Making a Murderer” on Netflix and podcasts like “Serial.” And, like “Three Billboards,” the series revolves around jerks. Someone spray-painted 27 penises on 27 cars in the staff parking lot of a high school in Oceanside, Calif. And two student reporters investigate. The prime suspect — a stoner-skate punk senior named Dylan Maxwell — has been expelled. The two reporters poke holes in the case against him and explore a gamut of alternative culprits.

Like Mr. McDonagh’s movie, “American Vandal” takes a circuitous route to earnestly asked philosophical questions about human nature. The show has a breezy confidence that never tips all the way into mockery. But it’s a lot less impressed with itself. It undermines the piety and ethical lapses in nonfiction mystery shows, while sharing with “Three Billboards” a belief in semaphores and that people aren’t any one thing. Also — and this feels important — it feels like the people who made this show understand their setting and the people who live there. I’ve never been to Oceanside, but I believe this show’s rendition of it.

Even in a setting as generic as an American high school, the show has a sense of place. And it’s a white show whose nonwhite characters don’t feel like objects. I’m not sure what Ebbing is. You can feel that uncertainty in the movie’s cop-out of a finale, in its bewildering loftiness (“Oscar Wilde” as a character’s last words) and in the coveralls Mildred spends most of the movie wearing. Her job is at a rustic gift shop, but the coveralls point to the harder blue-collar work we’ve seen Ms. McDormand do in movies like “North Country.” Here, these clothes signify emotional work, yet they feel like a put-on, too. Three billboards, sure — but outside a coffee shop in Portland, Ore.

The movie isn’t an explicit work of politics, but it reaches something political in certain people in the same way it touches something emotional in others. And yet in arguing about this movie what I don’t want, but where I’m afraid we are — with lots of film this time every year — is in another fight over a movie’s politics that manages to leave the movie itself behind.

Whose fault is that? We’ve been seduced and bullied into thinking of the awards season as a process of politics. The people who make the movies also run or finance “campaigns.” There is opposition research, and, in the form of other award shows, primaries, so to speak. And it all culminates with the election night we call the Academy Awards broadcast. So it’s only natural that we tend to think of best picture (and a few of the major, ancillary categories) as a kind of vote in which, while average people have no say, we’re all invested in the symbolism and catharsis of the outcome.

“Three Billboards,” which is not based on a true story but does have some reality flavoring, must appear worthy of elected office, in some way. This was at first the illusion presented by the people running the campaigns, and in turn over the years, has become the custom for lots of us.

The movie can’t be just the misfire that it is. The enthusiasm for it has to represent the injustice the movie believes it’s aware of — against young murdered women, their suffering dysfunctional families and black torture victims we never see — but fails to sufficiently poeticize or dramatize what Mr. McDonagh is up to here: a search for grace that carries a whiff of American vandalism. Of course, few movies can predict their moment, but “Three Billboards” might be inadequately built for this one.

Early on I suspected Dixon was actually the rapist/killer. Did anybody else think that? When the billboards went up in flames, I was convinced ... until Mildred’s ex-husband confessed to torching the billboards.

Does anybody else believe the “soldier” actually was the rapist/killer but his superiors were covering for him due to his “position” in the military? Maybe I’ve seen too many Law and Order episodes.

if Sam and Frances are gonna ago to Idaho and kill the guy anyway, because he's a "bad guy."

A disobedient daughter tells her mom “I hope you get raped” and the mom responds by saying "I hope you get raped. too!" And then guess what happens to the disobedient daughter?

Why in the fuck would the guy who raped a woman in Iraq travel across states to harass the mother of a woman who was also raped. Then he brags about it in a bar to some guy and guess who happens to be nearby? A guy who's trying to solve the crime.

Why would a responsible sheriff who was planning to kill himself very soon and leave behind a grieving widow and two young children take a much-needed $5000 cash and use it to pay for another month's rent on a billboard that criticized him? Doesn't make a lick of sense. Maybe if he called in a favor to keep it up I might be able to roll with it. But to use a month's salary on a "chess move" while leaving his beloved family that much more broke? No way that works logically. It was just another plot reveal.

Who says he was broke? He owned several horses and a pretty nice house and plenty of land. He may have been a small town sheriff but he was a high earner and nevermind his pension and benefits that would go to his family.

I never said he was broke, only that he was about to off himself and leave behind a family he clearly cared a great deal about. He probably was pretty well off for the neighborhood, but not so independently wealthy that he can carelessly throw away $5000 of his liquid cash on essentially a prank when he's leaving his family behind. Five Grand might pay for a year of college for one of his daughters, and don't tell me for a second that wouldn't occur to any father of young children. Every bit is important at that point. He knows he isn't going to bring any more in. He clearly loves his family and has thought his whole plan through. So yes, his pension and his life insurance will help them (I am going to assume that suicide doesn't void his policy), but even so, you can't be wasting 5 grand on a whim at that point.
Maybe you're more able to roll along with it than I am, but for me that moment, combined with Mildred suddenly and inexplicably deciding to fire-bomb the police station were two things that I think ruined the movie for me.
Those, along with Jason's sudden and highly improbable turn to goodness made me think that the writer of this movie doesn't know a thing about real actual human behavior and isn't sure if he was writing a mournful drama or a satire. I'll admit the best writers can do both in the same movie (and it's literally impossible not to think of the Coen Bros here, being a Francis McDormand movie set in a small Midwestern town), but in this case I felt that we were just bouncing back and forth without any logical reason or plan, besides getting to the end of the story and throwing in a few surprising twists along the way.

the rationality of the thoughts of someone who is planning to commit suicide

he shouldn't have spent the $5k on that. But he did. It was, in his mind, his way of apologizing to Mildred for not caring enough about her daughter's case when he should or could have done more. Very different, but similar to putting the same sort of thing in your will to make up for harm done, perceived or real, to another person.

After Mildred firebombs the police station and Dixon comes running out, the one dude who just happens to be walking around the corner of the completely empty city block at that very moment is Dinklage's character who, of course, has a crush on Mildred and is willing to provide a false alibi for her.

I also didn't like that after they go on a dinner date (and of course, in another corny plot twist, her ex-husband just happens to show up at the exact same restaurant) and she treats Dinklage like crap, he angrily chews her out (which I thought might become a turning point for her character, but it seems to have no effect on her at all -- even though everything he tells her is right on the nose) and then walks out on her and promptly disappears from the movie (I guess he had served his plot purpose -- ie. clearing Mildred of the firebombing and proving that she was still an asswipe despite almost killing someone) without getting any apology from Mildred.

It seems like the only reason Dinklage's character existed was to provide a convenient alibi for Mildred so that the movie wouldn't have to realistically deal with how someone who firebombed a police station and almost killed someone could get away with the crime so easily, and so that he could spell out for the audience what a douche she was being.