Freedomland **1/2 out of ****

She's Kerazy!

It’s been 14 years, more than 30 movies and four Academy Award nominations since Julianne Moore was the sexiest thing in “The Hand That Rocks The Cradle” and she’s never hacked like she does in “Freedomland” as a single mom named Brenda, who wanders into a hospital with stigmata wounds on her hands, the apparent victim of a carjacking. The movie’s a mess anyhow but Moore’s histrionic, nearly autistic performance gnaws at the high points of Richard Price’s screenplay, and the strong supporting work from Samuel L Jackson and Edie Falco.

Based on Price’s novel, Jackson stars as Lorenzo “Big Daddy” Council, lead homicide detective in Price’s fictional Dempsy, N.J., a burned-out mini-ghetto next door to the whiter, middle-class Gannon. Lorenzo falls into an asthmatic fit when Brenda describes a black man who must have come from a local project house to rob her car and drive off with her son. Complicating matters: Her brother Danny (Ron Eldard) is a Gannon cop who threatens to “lock down” the project “ like East (expletive) Berlin.” Lorenzo’s boss has similar ideas when he tosses renters out of their apartments for a full-building search. Outside the crowd remains, boiling to a riotous froth.

Using as a template the Susan Smith murders - the South Carolina woman concocted a carjacking tale before she admitted, after relentless questioning, that she drowned her children - “Freedomland” chugs on a dual-engine: The investigation into Cody’s dubious kidnapping; and the rising racial tension between the cops and the housing project. The plots have several blights - What happened to the car? What’s Danny’s role? How likely is Brenda’s revelatory connection to one of the tenants? - but Price has a talent for street dialogue, and his script pays close attention to the vocal rhythms of the working class - black and white - its use of profanity, its razor-thin trust in anyone, and the need to self-fulfill fears of the other.

Underneath all of “Freedomland” runs a doomsday current of a world too broken to ever reconcile all the festering guilt and pain; whatever Brenda’s done, she’s seems to have been ritually punished for it already. Maybe that’s why Price has Lorenzo talking plainly about his faith in two scenes. It’s the last ladder out of the sewer. But he is caught in between his people and Brenda, who is certainly lying, but is not necessarily a killer. Jackson, paunchy and aging, dials down his usual barking cadence to create a thoughtful, tired man. He leans on Brenda, he presses her gently, he assigns her a personal comforter, and he eventually relies on Karen Colluci (Falco, in the Frances McDormand role), leader of Friends of Kent, a group of moms who find lost children.

It’s Karen who eventually reaches through Brenda’s hysterical sludge in one of the few scenes Joe Roth directs with the austerity it deserves. But he generally lets Moore put pickles on the goulash, the result of which are several different personas: This one speaks with a vaguely southern accent with broken diction, while another one says “ I over-abstained, you see,” while a third rocks and twirls about like some neurological case. Moore depicts dawning madness as a method buffet that reminds of me of Brittany Murphy’s babble in “Don’t Say A Word,” and Anthony Hopkins’ last scene in “Titus,” when he thought he was going to retire, and chose to announce it by miming several of his favorite actors. He concluded by flipping off the camera.