At the dead center of U-Turn is Bobby Cooper (Sean Penn), an eight-fingered lug making his way through the Arizona desert to pay off a gambling debt in Las Vegas. A busted radiator forces him to stop in the tiny, broken town of Superior, where he meets up with its brutally odd citizenry. Among them are Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez), a beautiful tease with a horrible story, and her husband Jake (Nick Nolte), a happily tortured real estate agent who has a taste for the ungodly.

Knowing that Bobby is in financial straits, Jake offers him the job of killing his wife for the insurance money. In turn, Grace asks him to kill Jake so that they can raid his secret stash. Bobby claims to not have the stomach for murder, but when push comes to shove, somebody has to go.

The elements of murder, a beautiful woman, an ugly husband, and an outsider with bad timing all play into film noir, which is how Stone labels the film. But he lacks the constraint for noir's stylishness and goes, instead, for the punch in the gut. Working from the screenplay by John Ridley, based on his novel Stray Dogs, Stone unleashes rather than unwinds the plot and swaps intrigue and romance for road kill and masturbation.

At this point in his career, Stone works pretty much in a genre of his own making. He's not afraid to whack at the boundaries of convention or to experiment. U-Turn, shot by longtime Stone cinematographer Robert Richardson, has a bright, throw-back look, which, when paired with the hokey score by Ennio Morricone, intensifies the sense that Bobby's stepped into an alternative reality. The wealth of oddball characters -- Billy Bob Thornton as the mechanic, Claire Danes as a dumb-as-dirt teenage hussy, and Jon Voight as a pseudo-wise blind man -- add to Superior's suffocating atmosphere.