At one point in Strange Fruit, the moody Southern thriller from director and writer Kyle Schickner, the soft-spoken Deputy Mathers warns attorney William Boyals, “Just remember, things ain’t always what they seem.” Boyals, who has returned to his rural Louisiana roots to investigate the rape and lynching murder of childhood friend Kelvin Ayers, mutters, “What the fuck is this, a Grisham novel?” Strange Fruit doesn’t quite have all the blockbuster trappings of a movie like The Firm, but it comes close. It’s got the good-looking hero, a vicious crime, an atmospheric location, and a bigoted small-town sheriff trying to cover up something dark and disturbing.

The film opens with a slow, wide-panning shot of the bayou at night; as the camera moves down the slick expanse of water we see a homely looking building strung with Christmas lights. A man lurches out of the building, beer in hand, and weaves his way to the floating bridge that he boards to pull himself across the water to the parking lot.

But the sultry summer stillness is broken when he drops his keys on the ground next to his truck, and it suddenly becomes obvious that someone is following him. When he is attacked, the music abruptly breaks into the screechy violins of the low-budget horror genre, lending a ghoulish quality to the violent scene that follows: the man is raped with a fallen branch while theatrical blood gurgles out of his mouth, and then he is lynched in a nearby tree.

Meanwhile, successful New York attorney William Boyals (Kent Faulcon) has left his Louisiana childhood behind him, and is engaged in a half-hearted romance with a man named Cedric while dealing with a busy work schedule. But when he finds out that his childhood friend Kelvin has been viciously killed, he quickly returns to the back country of Louisiana to find out why local Sheriff Jensey (Sam Jones) refuses to acknowledge that Kelvin’s death was a murder.

It turns out that Sheriff Jensey, who allows his deputies to watch porn videos in the police station, is as homophobic as they come, not to mention racist. Jensey is such a stereotypically despicable villain that seeing Boyals verbally take him down several notches during their first meeting at the police station is one of the most enjoyable scenes in the film.

But Boyals encounters resistance everywhere he turns in his unofficial investigation, not just from Sheriff Jensey. Even the patrons of the Gator, the local gay bar that Kelvin was leaving just before he was murdered, refuse to talk, wary of destroying their only safe place to gather. Nevertheless, with the assistance of Kelvin’s brother, Duane (the scene-stealing David Raibon), Boyals soon fixates on a likely suspect: Jordan Walker (Shane Woodson), Sheriff Jensey’s redneck, homophobic nephew.

Walker is such an obvious red herring that it’s hard to believe that Boyals actually believes that he’s fingered the right man, particularly after he is warned by Deputy Mathers that “things ain’t always what they seem.” But the truth, which is revealed so quickly at the conclusion that you’ll miss some of it if you blink, doesn’t entirely resonate because of its rushed feel.

Written, directed, and produced by openly bisexual Kyle Schickner (Full Frontal, Rose By Any Other Name), Strange Fruit is generally an entertaining, suspenseful thriller in the pulp crime fiction tradition. Some of the scenes are a bit heavy-handed in their melodrama—particularly the opening scene in which Kelvin is murdered—but the film makes up for it with sympathetic characters. Kent Faulcon is solid in the lead role of William Boyals, and David Raibon plays the comic-relief sidekick for all it’s worth.

Strange Fruit may not have the polished sheen of a blockbuster Grisham movie, but that’s part of its charm.

Strange Fruit screens on June 22 and June 24 at the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, and at Outfest in L.A. on July 13 and 17.