Nicole Kidman in Destroyer (Annapurna Pictures)

 In Destroyer, Nicole Kidman looks like a car that’s been torched for the insurance money. She has achieved an unnerving transformation to play ravaged police detective Erin Bell, parched as the Los Angeles gullies where she works her cases and hobbled by hangovers and a guilty past. Erin is the kind of hollowed-out mess people avoid on the street, but she’s on a mission. Director Karyn Kusama’s sweeping, dark film runs on the fumes of the character’s desperation; Erin will do anything to get revenge on evildoers from her past, but she craves it most of all on herself.

Erin blearily awakens to a murder case at the end of a night spent passed out in her car. Her colleagues in the sheriff’s department clearly don’t trust her and don’t want her on the case, but Erin notices a telltale tattoo on the back of the corpse’s neck that sets her off in frantic pursuit of the murderer; she and the killer have a long history. Destroyer flashes backs to a rock chick–pretty, more hopeful Erin going undercover with police partner turned lover Chris (Sebastian Stan) to infiltrate a gang led by a psychopath with a Charles Manson–like control over his followers. Getting mixed up with these criminals ruined Erin’s life, and now she wants to even out the score. But the film hints that the time spent with the gang may have provided the one sense she ever had of belonging, adding a note of poignancy to her quest in an emotional landscape low in tenderness.

Erin’s pursuit of the scumbag leads us on a tour of LA’s chop shops, dive bars, Latino evangelical churches, and Malibu mansions, and her reminiscences take us back to a scuzzy desert trailer park. The odyssey through the city and its fringes evokes To Live and Die in L.A.’s hard-eyed view of an asphalt maze of corruption. Kusama stages some killer action scenes crackling with blazing guns and savage beatings. The soundtrack is dense with bursts of heavy metal and the sound of teeth being knocked loose, so a Russian roulette scene played in dead silence stands out. Moments like these make the movie the devastating, stylish thriller (and twisted morality tale) it aims to be.

Not all of Destroyer can live up to its best sequences. Too much plot stuffing makes the narrative baggy at times. As well as pursuing a murderer, Erin is trying to save her rebellious teenage daughter from heading south, and though the mother and daughter’s scenes together are well acted, they leave you itching for Erin to bolt out the door and head back to her life of crime. The story’s end doubles in on itself very cleverly—but it should have ended there and left us stunned.

These caveats don’t undermine a film that for all its flaws is impressively driven and gritty, and although modern, it has a touch of the timeless in its acknowledgement of the enduring thirst for revenge. With Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Widows, and now Destroyer, a movie subgenre emerged this year of women with nothing left to lose. Of them all, Kidman’s Erin is the most damaged and reckless. Her performance awakens the raw part in all of us that’s been burned.