Recently released on DVD: "Tennessee*

Grade: D+

There are signs that Aaron Woodley, the director of Tennessee, an earnest, increasingly preposterous road movie about unhealed family wounds and fraternal bonds, wanted to make a Terrence Malick film. In the early scenes of the movie, whose setting shifts from the desert outskirts of Albuquerque to Texas, Oklahoma and finally Tennessee, the camera studies the glowing Western sky at twilight as though determined to find a visionary beauty in desolate wasteland.

It is outside Albuquerque that Carter Armstrong (Adam Rothenberg), a cabdriver in his early 30s, lives a marginal existence in a trailer with his younger brother, Ellis (Ethan Peck, grandson of Gregory). Awkward flashbacks reveal that 15 years earlier the young Carter (Ryan Lynn), a high school football star, fled his childhood home in Knoxville, Tenn., dragging Ellis with him, after being terrorized by his drunken, abusive father, Roy (Bill Sage). Like his dad Carter is now a bitter alcoholic hothead itching for excuses to lash out at the world. But he is also fiercely protective of Ellis, who, as depicted in Russell Schaumburg’s lumpy screenplay, is too angelic to be true.

The brothers’ lives are uprooted when Ellis is found to have leukemia. After Carter proves incompatible as a bone marrow donor, he decides they must return to Knoxville to determine if their father would be a suitable candidate. At a Texas diner Ellis befriends Krystal Evans (Mariah Carey), a waitress and aspiring country singer-songwriter. When she offers to put them up for the night, they encounter her monstrous husband, Frank (Lance Reddick), a state trooper who loathes the brothers on sight and threatens Krystal’s life if she touches one of them.

Seizing her opportunity to escape, she flees with them before dawn. On discovering her disappearance, Frank, convinced she has been kidnapped, gives chase.

Although the setup has its gripping moments, Tennessee collapses once the three stop in Nashville with Frank breathing down their necks. Although Ms. Carey makes a brave effort to put on a Texan accent, later in the movie she seems to have forgotten it, and there is nothing countrylike about her singing or the song with which she wows the audience in a Nashville talent competition. It isn’t saying much, but at least her work here is more substantial than in the catastrophic Glitter.

By this time Krystal has metamorphosed from goodhearted to gooey sweet. The story cedes its final shreds of credibility in a contrived scene where Frank, observing someone else’s abused wife, miraculously sees the light and softens. From here on Tennessee wades hip-deep in mush.