The movie "Iowa" is not for the faint hearted. It depicts what is supposed to be a typical young couple in a small farm community and their torturous decline into methamphetamine addition. It's not a pretty picture.

It's fun starting out. Like a crowd at a Fourth of July fireworks display doing "ah-h-h-hs" and "ooh-h-hs" in unison to the more spectacular displays, the audience will be going, "I know where that is" and "Hey, look, there's the Courthouse." But soon the story line begins demanding your attention. Matt Farnsworth's Esper Harte is played very low key. Dianne Foster's Donna Huffman, with her one cute dimple as deep as can be without going completely through her cheek, makes a convincing Midwestern girl-next-door.

What led me first to believe the film was going to be campy in a darkly humorous way was Michael T. Weiss' (from the TV show The Pretender) Larry Clarkson - a probation officer gone bad. Too nasty and mean, in fact, to be believable. I kept expecting him to twirl his moustache like the cartoon meanie, Snively Whiplash. Espry's mother played by Rosanna Arquette comes right out of "Mommy Dearest."Her most memorable line was something to the effect of, "I was willing to kill my son for you and now you're leaving me?"

It didn't help that the film's promo for the Tribeca Film Festival in New York read, "Forget 4-H, the kids are not alright in Iowa. A harrowing account of the methamphetamine addiction ravaging the sons and daughters of the heartland, who should be out working in the local Wal-Mart or milking cows on the family farm but instead have turned into hallucinating tweakers and depraved crank monsters."

It sounded like Dr. Hunter Thompson meets Hee Haw.

But there is little humor in the movie. I found myself as a viewer moving from a growing uneasiness into outright tension. The scenes that will make you especially uncomfortable are where the couple and their friends slip into the feverish world of delusions and paranoia. It's not easy watching two likeable characters ruin their lives.

A surprise was how well Sioux City-born David Backus played Espry's best friend, Nick Slavens. A born loser, I found him to be the most sympathetic character in the movie.

And I was especially impressed with our own Louie Johnson's performance as a shotgun-wielding farmer discovering the theft of his anhydrous ammonia.

There's sex and violence in the movie, so leave the kids at home - though nothing worse than you will see on late night Cinemax.

One of the more annoying aspects of the film won't even register with audiences from outside area. To promote the bleak mood of Espry's and Donna's crumbling lives, much of the scenery is not that pleasant. Junky farm houses and the Square's back alleys are used as backdrops. Even the jail scene was not filmed at the Law Center, but in the dungeon-like cells of the Appanoose County Museum's old sheriff's building.

Anyone proud of their community would wish for more flattering film footage, but the movie is not meant as a Chamber of Commerce promotional tool.

Centerville leaders expressed their hesitancy when first approached about the film, fearing the impressions it would create of the community with national viewers. Farnsworth proved true to his promise and Centerville is not mentioned through the flick, though a side view of the water tower exposed "Cent." I guess the town could have been Centralia. The camera operators did make good use of the old steam engine water tower that clearly reads "Mystic."

What was fun were Farnsworth's quick tributes to past films, from a corn scene reminiscent of "Field of Dreams," to a derby from "Clockwork Orange" and a cryptic dying utterance worthy of "Rosebud' in Citizen Cane.

The first principle of enjoying any fiction is to suspend belief. Every movie has scenes that are not quite believable when taken in the context of "the real world." So even if a violent shootout at the Mystic gas station doesn't draw out even one curious neighbor, I let it go. After all, I did warn Weiss during the filming of that scene that this was Mystic and when he fired off his blanks, half the hillside might return fire - and a friend up the street didn't even pull out a squirrel gun. The movie does have a professional feel to it and I liked the music. Since the Majestic received only a DVD of the movie and not 35 mm film, the quality is not as good as what would show if it finds a distributor.

So I recommend to adults who can stand film violence and aren't overly offended by nudity and sex. It is too bad that the ones who really need to see the film with its graphic portrayal of destructive crank addiction, young teens, won't be viewing it in the theaters. I guess they'll just have to wait until its on Cinemax.