In the movies, men with sexual secrets tend to possess a commonality of appearance and a shared grammar of movement and expression. Frozen-faced and unhealthily haggard (they don’t sleep well), their eyes haunted and inward-looking, they walk with a weary, lurching gait as though wading through custard. They don’t talk much, never smile, and often flinch when others—women, especially—address them without warning. They’re characters forced to explore a dead-end street, trapped in the certain knowledge they’ll be outed, probably with disastrous consequences.

These characters offer actors the possibility of critical attention and an opportunity to get minimalist. Often this involves long stretches of standing and staring. In the case of Walter (Kevin Bacon), the recently-paroled pedophile of The Woodsman, both activities take place at the window of his apartment which—in one of the film’s several thudding improbabilities—conveniently overlooks an elementary school playground. Like a diabetic living above a candy store, Walter’s efforts to keep his therapeutic journal are continually derailed by the cart-wheeling preteens across the street. Still, he’s trying. He has a job at a lumber yard, a sympathetic boss (David Alan Grier), and a well-intentioned brother-in-law (Benjamin Bratt), whose disgust crawls mere millimeters beneath a sincere desire to understand. Walter also has a girlfriend, a brassy-but-vulnerable co-worker named Vickie (Bacon’s wife, Kyra Sedgwick) who seems recklessly undeterred by his past. Vickie’s interest in Walter may not be entirely healthy—she’s nursing extensive damage of her own—yet their scenes together provide welcome moments of genuine exhalation in a film where the protagonist’s every emotion feels, by necessity, rigidly controlled.

Few things incite a lynch mob more than the scent of pedophilia, and The Woodsman is a grim and courageous attempt to shed light rather than scorn. First-time director Nicole Kassell, amplifying Steven Fechter’s stringent play, places Walter’s problem within a general framework of sexual victimization. Tentacles of incest touch more than one character, and—in the film’s most unlikely plot thread—Walter witnesses the creepy exploits of another sexual predator. But in straddling the fence between sympathy and condemnation, Kassell’s honest ambivalence may be both The Woodsman’s most laudable quality as a film and its greatest liability as a marketable product.

Audiences like to be given emotional direction, and the film’s determination to present Walter as a real human being can come across as indecisive or bet-hedging. It also places an extraordinary burden on Bacon, who’s free to be neither the scheming pervert (let’s stone him!) nor the pathetic victim of uncontrollable urges (let’s find him a program!). Either choice would be simpler—for actor and audience alike—than the script’s fidelity to nuance and psychological complexity. This is apparent in Walter’s repeated attempts to reconnect with his sister (a relationship with its own dark side) and his young niece, his disappointment revealing a genuine bewilderment about urges he’s still not convinced are completely harmful. “I never hurt them,” he tells Vickie in a moment of horrible self-delusion.

In one chilling passage, Walter follows a young girl (an amazing Hannah Pilkes) to a park bench where we see first-hand the fragility of rehabilitation. The scene is remarkable, not just for the shock of seeing Walter—wavering precariously between self-loathing and desire—transform into an innocently friendly seducer, but also for its sense of measured inevitability. I was instantly reminded of Nicole Kidman’s bathtub scene with the young boy in Birth, and its similar “How far are they going to go with this?” momentum.

The Woodsman is smart enough not to ask us to forgive Walter, or even understand him (he doesn’t understand himself). Even so, casting is a form of dice-loading and Bacon’s presence, if not exactly predisposing us to empathy, at least makes the character difficult to despise. A recovering alcoholic once told me an essential step toward rehabilitation is accepting that you will always be what other people think of you. This struggle lies at the heart of The Woodsman, and is the reason Walter may re-offend. “I’m not a monster!” he screams when his sister refuses to see him. But in her eyes, that’s exactly what he is.