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“Nothing You Are About to See Is True.”

Those are the words that teasingly introduce True History of the Kelly Gang, the dazzling and defiantly rogue western from director Justin Kurzel that plays with facts to get at a deeper truth about Ned Kelly. This we know is true about 19th-century outlaw: The Irish-Catholic bank robber and cop killer who wore a metal helmet and a suit of armor in his final shootout with the law became known as Australia’s Robin Hood as he and his gang fought against...

Australia 1867. The audience is told that nothing they’re about to see is true as a bushranger named Ned Kelly narrates his story. But his account of his story isn’t necessarily the truthful one. Most are familiar with reading a celebrity’s autobiography for the first time and realizing how the subject’s own words often contradict other texts. Events in their lives are glossed over and changed to fit the image they want the world to see of themselves. Their life almost becoming Arthurian, a legend so mixed with fact and fiction that you begin to question if they were even real. Stories can easily be rewritten, and True History of the Kelly Gang plays with this mythicism with dramatic flair.

Based on Peter Carey’s novel of the same name, director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Shaun Grant present a gothic western set in the colonial Australian badlands...

True History of the Kelly Gang opens with a title card stating that nothing in the film is actually true, a convenient choice for director Justin Kurzel as it lays out his film’s main point from the very start. The film is an adaptation from Peter Carey’s novel of the same name, and the title is meant to be a little ironic. Carey wrote his novel from the perspective of Australian folk hero Ned Kelly writing his autobiography, but the story was full of embellishments and untruths. Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant stick to this idea, throwing in anachronistic choices throughout the late-1800s setting to evoke a punk rock mood, which aligns nicely with Kelly’s own rebellious nature.

Kurzel isn’t so radically minded when it comes to structure, as the film plays out in a linear chronology of events. Split into three parts, it falls...

When Australian robber Ned Kelly was executed in 1880 at the age of 25, his last words were reported as “Such is life.” Director Justin Kurzel’s sizzling, violent epic “True History of the Kelly Gang” questions that myth, suggesting that the legendary Australian criminal would never shrug off his fate, since he was a fighter right through to the bitter end. The movie hovers in a curious paradox, coming across as both operatic tribute and horrific condemnation, but it’s never less than a nasty crime drama with plenty of grimy characters to keep the stakes compelling throughout.

Working with his regular screenwriter Shaun Grant, Kurzel has constructed a taut and vivid overview of Kelly’s harsh upbringing and how it transformed him into a vengeful monstrosity, played by George Mackay as Mick Jagger by way of Freddy Krueger. The movie’s jagged narrative and expressionistic asides minimize Kelly’s robberies...

Back in 1970, Tony Richardson’s “Ned Kelly” hit upon a neat idea: What if you got an honest-to-God rock star, Mick Jagger, to play Australia’s most notorious 19th-century folk hero? A neat idea is all it was, though, and the listless, unconfidently acted movie that resulted was duly forgotten. Nearly half a century later, however, Justin Kurzel’s thrilling new take on the legend gives Kelly some glam-rock swagger without any need for stunt casting. Lithe and volatile and recklessly stylized to the hilt, “True History of the Kelly Gang” has moves like Jagger, but a head still teeming with language and history. Adapted from Peter Carey’s Man Booker-winning 2000 novel, Kurzel’s roughhousing, ripely acted interpretation does full justice to the book’s rugged dirt-poetry vernacular and rich biographical particulars, while staging Kelly’s criminal rise and fall as a vision all its own: a wildly gyrating sensory assault of blood,...