In ‘On Swift Horses,’ a handsome trio stumbles into romance and messier feelings

What looks at first glance to be your standard postwar love triangle — made up of oil-and-water brothers and a cagey housewife — reveals itself to be more like a multi-faceted crystal of lust and longing in the handsomely realized romantic melodrama “On Swift Horses.”

Unpacking the apprehensions and opportunities of boom-time America as laid out in Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, director Daniel Minahan gamely plants one foot in Douglas Sirk territory while glancing in the direction of Todd Haynes. But just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry. It’s a good-looking movie about sublimated lives and the need to break free, one that feels torn between presenting the surface allure of those desires in a repressive time and exploring anything deeper.

For an hour, though, it has the pop and pull of a midcentury soap opera that benefits from R-rated frankness. Stifled Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones) agrees to marry her beau, Lee (Will Poulter), back from a stint in the Korean War, and uproot their Kansas lives to make a go of it in sunny, shiny, expanding Southern California. Lee’s cynical cardsharp of a brother, Julius (Jacob Elordi), was meant to be part of that dream move, but the call of gambling takes Julius to Las Vegas instead.

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What for Lee is garden-variety disappointment about not having family around is, in Muriel, a more intangible sexual absence she can’t articulate beyond an interest in the appeal of risk. A nicely understated anxiety in Edgar-Jones’ portrayal conveys her new life in suburban San Diego. Already good at hiding cigarettes, Muriel starts lying about her communication with Julius, while keeping from Lee her winnings from racetrack bets (acting on tips overheard at her diner job).

Julius, meanwhile, becomes a card-cheat spotter for a casino as an act of atonement for his thieving ways — it’s easy to buy Elordi’s take on ’50s rogue sensitivity. But high in the sweltering catwalks above the gambling tables, he meets sexy, forthright Tijuana transplant Henry (Diego Calva) and suddenly the other vein of concealment in Julius’s cautious, cynical life — being gay — is at risk of breaking wide open into a consuming passion. (Metaphor alert: Thrill-seeking Henry drags Julius out to the desert to watch bomb tests.) Dormant attractions in Muriel are separately tested, too, by openly queer and political Latina neighbor Sandra (Sasha Calle), who upon first meeting her, holds out a palm so Muriel, trying her first olive, can spit out the pit. Someone’s list of secrets is about to get longer.

Bryce Kass’ incident-packed screenplay keeps Minahan busy, but the twinned narratives and their snap-into-place dangers ultimately overwhelm the unease that make the first half of “On Swift Horses” so palpably jangly inside all the period production design and Luc Montpellier’s crisp cinematography. Minahan, a TV veteran, eventually falls into the trap of episodic management, to the point where characters lose their individuality within the story’s growing dependence on constructs, gestures and making points.

The acting is a saving grace, especially Edgar-Jones’ commitment to nuance and Poulter’s refreshingly shaded Lee, whose depth of awareness at a critical moment is a believable surprise, beautifully handled by the actor. Only Elordi, variously treated like beefcake and brooder, seems lost trying to square Julius’ early vulnerability with the final act’s hopeful romance. His grand denouement is meant to be a catharsis for a deliberately corrective slice of emotional history. But it instead feels like an easy escape hatch when what “On Swift Horses” promised was a richer psychological landscape about what roils inside hearts accustomed to hiding.