11-year-old Polly (Ana Sophia Heger) begins She Rides Shotgun alone, the last kid not yet picked up outside her elementary school. Eventually, her distant father, Nate (Taron Egerton), emerges. Fresh out of jail and plenty seedy, he implores his offspring to get into the automobile. After a moment of hesitation, she climbs into the shotgun seat. It’s the last moment of her old life. In an act of revenge, the white supremacist gang Aryan Steel has framed Nate for Polly’s mom’s murder. So, from here on out, father and daughter are on the run.

What follows is a solid mixture of a Corman McCarthy novel, Road to Perdition, and early 70s Al Pacino movies like The Panic in Needle Park or Scarecrows. Director Nick Rowland’s adaptation of Jordan Harper’s 2017 novel from a Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski script is a grim but compelling odyssey. Much of that achievement comes from eschewing the routine for an especially bullet-ridden yarn about realizing your parents are ordinary, flawed souls.

Until now, Nate has largely been absent from Polly’s life. She’s only heard stories or whispers about him. Now, he’s standing in front of her, no longer a far-off soul stuck in a jail cell but a human navigating impossible scenarios. That informs a fascinating rapport hinging between a grown man rife with moral complexity and his comparatively innocent daughter. Again and again, Collins and Piotrowski’s screenplay and Egerton’s performance make audiences utter “aww” and “hold on a sec!” simultaneously as the pair bond. Unconventional father-daughter lessons like how to best bash a man’s skull with a baseball bat or steal a car nonetheless exude genuine father/daughter affection. There’s a fascinating mixture of genuine poignancy and intentional discomfort in these She Rides Shotgun scenes that’s utterly compelling to watch.

Rowland and cinematographer Wyatt Garfield’s often raw, unglamorous camerawork nicely accentuates the on-screen ambiguity. A mid-film sequence best exemplifies this as a wounded Nate and Polly hide out in a mobile home scattered with Christian paraphernalia that acts as a truck stop church. Opting for this location alone is a kind of inspired choice that other modern movies aren’t making. It exudes a claustrophobic aura perfect for the two characters after their close call with the law.

As Polly toils away at cleaning Nate’s wound, the pair converses about religion. She discloses how she doesn’t observe anything. Throwaway anecdotes about school indicate this is the first time speaking so openly, save for conversations with supportive late mother. In the worst conditions imaginable, she uncovers newfound freedom. That transfixing paradox nicely materializes thanks to Heger’s performance of the unhurried writing captured by tight camerawork.

If there’s anyone that’s going to inspire post-viewing chatter from She Rides Shotgun, it’s this adolescent actor. Heger is astonishingly good here, particularly in how she very much acts like an imperfect, messy child. Duress doesn’t suddenly inspire Polly to drop verbal pearls of wisdom or act exactly like an adult. She has the same jagged fallibilities as any 11-year-old. Heger executes it with impressive, heartbreaking finesse.

She also has excellent chemistry with Egerton. Much like Channing Tatum in Logan Lucky, Egerton is one of the few modern leading men who can portray rough-and-tumble flyover country souls without it feeling like Hillbilly Elegy dress-up. Part of what makes this Rocketman veteran’s turn work is his confidence in playing things restrained. Beneath Nate’s barrage of tattoos, Egerton doesn’t indulge in a cartoony “tough guy” voice or gait like less assured performers might.

Instead, he lets subtler details underline qualities like the guy’s unpredictability or the regret that informs his every choice. Egerton beckons audiences to inspect Nate closer rather than pushing everyone away through a deeply caricatured performance.

Unsurprisingly, given Heger and Egerton’s excellent work, She Rides Shotgun’s best scenes simply follow Nate and Polly on the lam. There’s a terrifically paced set piece, for example, that escalates so absorbingly from a bank robbery gone awry to a nail-biting car chase. There’s superb camerawork and surging levels of danger. However, putting these two characters at the heart of the sequence truly makes it another level of engrossing.

Unfortunately, the Shotgun script eventually detours into a noticeably weaker third act involving a final confrontation with Aryan Steel. Aryan Steel leader Sheriff Houser (John Carroll Lynch) awkwardly first appears in a cramped outdoor medium shot, a clumsy visual foreshadowing of the underwhelm to come. While seeing Lynch on the big screen is always welcome, his character’s scenes are too divorced from the central material.

Even here, though, Rowland shows command over tension, such as a hotel room tête-à-tête where Detective John Park (Rob Yang) confronts a duplicitous colleague. Meanwhile, the climactic shootout involving Aryan Steel forces, though plagued with exceedingly unmemorable backdrops, achieves vivid dramatic mileage out of filtering nearly everything through Polly’s point of view.

She Rides Shotgun’s tremendously involving, suspenseful filmmaking solidifies it as a worthy edge-of-your-seat crime thriller. Heger, Egerton, and the screenwriting add another layer of emotional potency to the proceedings. They effortlessly unearth all the intricacies within a messy father/daughter dynamic that’s equally moving and deranged. Aftersun by way of Run All Night, She Rides Shotgun is an enthralling creation with a haunting kick.

She Rides Shotgun belts into multiplex seats starting August 1.

She Rides Shotgun Trailer: