The screenplay concerns justice and redemption in rural Georgia during the Great Depression.

A southern man, Jesse Banks Rhodes (Harry Connick, Jr.), is released from a prison work camp in Louisiana, 1936, after being wrongly imprisoned for eleven years.

He begins working for a plantation owner (Walton Goggins) and rents a shed from a farmer (Pete Postlethwaite) with two daughters (Patricia Clarkson and Vinessa Shaw).

After witnessing the murder of a black worker at the hands of a drunken white racist boss, Jesse is forced to prove his innocence, so injustice will not happen again.

[2] The movie was filmed at various locations in Georgia including Mansfield and the Southeastern Railway Museum.