Starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, and Sam Rockwell. Rated 14A.

The title tells the tale in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and that's okay, because it is the nature of mythology, not narrative suspense, that is the subject of this satisfying and meditatively constructed film.

Based on Ron Hansen's novel, which drew its identical title from the troubadourian dime-store booklets of the late 19th century, the movie is an in-depth portrait of the outlaw as charismatic psychopath. Brad Pitt makes an indelible mark as Jesse, the younger and more infamous James Brother. Sam Shepard plays Frank, who drifts away after the siblings pull one last railroad heist in frigid Missouri, notable for the ragtag local hoodlums they drew upon to keep the gang going.

Out of this ad hoc group, dumb-but-loyal Charley Ford (Sam Rockwell, in a comically melancholy performance) is useful. But 19-year-old Robert Ford (played in a star-making turn by Casey Affleck) creeps everybody out with his glassy stare and eagerness to please. Only Jesse doesn't seem to recognize his own Mark David Chapman in the making. Or does he? Like John Lennon's baby-faced murderer, the youngest Ford has grown up fixated on his hero, and his adulation can shade too easily into hatred, given the right mixture of dreaminess and disappointment both of which, we are encouraged to believe, were staples of the teenager's life beforehand.

Normally, it's a cinematic sin to tell instead of show; even worse to describe, through dialogue or narration, things that are already being seen. However, New Zealand born director Andrew Dominik's literary approach works (he also wrote the 160-minute film's screenplay), with just a few big events and a lot of waiting, because Jesse's eventual downfall is both a fait accompli and a series of totemic moments in American celebrity culture.

The homoerotic understirrings in this tale of complicated, Old West doppelgí¤ngers are on the obvious side. What is harder to grasp, though, is the utter disinterest in the women of that landscape. So kudos for hiring Mary-Louise Parker to play Jesse James's beyond-tolerant wife, but surely she must have done something besides cook and cry?