Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman (Dawn Jones/Roadside Attractions)

Actor-turned-director Tommy Lee Jones has resisted calling his second feature film a Western, though it shares familiar visual iconography with the genre. (If it looks like a Western, feels like a Western….) Expect characters to be upstaged by the Big Sky panoramas (filmed in arid, sunbaked New Mexico). Storywise, the plot could be pitched as a cross-country trek, as in True Grit, set in a bluntly violent post-Peckinpah landscape, now the norm in almost any attempt to revitalize the oater.

Regardless of how it’s pigeonholed and no matter how familiar some sequences play out, this tender and raw redemption tale is its own animal, operating by a volatile set of rules. The sharp shifts of tone take its two protagonists, an upright spinster and an irascible outsider, on a winding route. Maybe no other film this year has so many mood swings, from the heartfelt to the horrific.

The screenplay, adapted from Glendon Swarthout’s novel, provides a bare backstory for the plainspoken Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank in, hands down, her richest role since Million Dollar Baby). From upstate New York, she somehow trekked across the country, leaving her kin back East, to plow the hard soil of the white-hot prairie in the pre–Civil war Nebraska Territory. Never having been married, she lives alone in the most sturdily built structure for miles around.

The cards are stacked again Mary Bee. In the first 10 minutes, she withstands a humiliating rejection from a potential husband—it’s slim pickings out on the frontier. The man on whom she has hung her hopes for marriage calls her “too bossy and too damn plain.” Her most beloved companion is her horse Dorothy, named for her sister.

By drawing the black pebble in a makeshift lottery, she’s chosen among her tiny Methodist congregation to transport three local women across dangerous territory for care in Iowa. Their husbands claim the three are crazy; many in the audience would say the wives suffer from depression, among many, many other illnesses. (Hmm. Bergman on the prairie?) With bars across the one window of Mary Bee’ boxed wagon, the three tied-up women are in the equivalent of a mobile jail, and the actresses playing the feral-like prisoners—Grace Gunner, Miranda Otto, and Sonja Richter—deliver the type of ferocious, vanity-free meltdowns typically given by German actresses of the 1970s.

Mary Bee singlehandedly carts the women until she saves the life of a crusty vagrant, army deserter George Briggs (Jones), from a certain lynching for claim jumping, but not before he makes a promise: He’ll be indebted to her if she frees him from the noose. The Good Samaritan act has strings attached: Mary Bee will give him $300 if he’ll do as he’s told and assist her on the arduous trek. If there’s a question of whether civilization teeters closer to law or chaos in the remote, isolated territory, The Homesman tips the scale toward total madness.

There’s a rough-and-tough sparseness to the production design and a tacitly modern sensibility that underlies the action, though the audience’s reactions may likely run counter to the onscreen homesteaders, particularly when it comes to the menfolk. Yet Jones deftly refrains from imposing a 21st-century outcome or judgment. The film offers empathetic and insightful portrayals—especially for its women—without an anachronistic overtone. We in the audience may look on as armchair therapists (post-partum depression, check), but the film concentrates more on the trail ahead.

Swank has brought determination and strength to many of her previous roles. On camera, she stands out: tall, slender, and muscular, no matter the role. But delicate, she’s not. She doesn’t totally surrender to Mary Bee’s fears or anxieties. Her restrained presence mutes some of the impact of the twists and turns, mainly because her thoughts are shielded from the audience. Had the movie been adapted shortly after the novel’s 1988 publication, a more transparent and live wire of a performance from the likes of a Sally Field or Glenn Close would have been a better fit temperamentally.

Nevertheless, the abrupt transitions of tone engage as much as they unsettle, and that’s Jones’s most deft move. Just when you think the storyline will tread in one direction, he offers a shock or revelation driven by character and circumstance, such as a cutaway revealing a small but important detail. Jones revels in contrasts, right up to the joyous but downright melancholic ending.