• Courtesy Of A24 Films
• Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart are a power couple in Rose Glass' romantic noir thriller.

How many violent lesbian noir thrillers can you name? Probably not many. But Love Lies Bleeding, the second feature from UK director Rose Glass (Saint Maud) could blaze a path in that regard. Since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, fueled by Kristen Stewart's star power, the luridly titled movie has inspired a CNN think piece and descriptions such as "sapphic fever dream on steroids" (on the LGBTQ culture site Them). See it in Burlington at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas.

The deal

In 1989 New Mexico, gym manager Lou (Stewart) cleans toilets and rejects the advances of a flirty coworker (Anna Baryshnikov) with equally flinty determination. Estranged from her scary dad (Ed Harris), who runs a cross-border smuggling operation, Lou stays in town only to protect her sister (Jena Malone) from the violence of an abusive husband (Dave Franco).

But everything changes when itinerant bodybuilder Jackie (Katy O'Brian) struts into Lou's life. With all of her belongings in a duffel, Jackie is hitchhiking her way from Oklahoma — where she fled her homophobic family — to a competition in Las Vegas. She's earning quick cash waiting tables at Lou's dad's shooting range.

The two women's chemistry is immediate and undeniable. Lou invites Jackie to crash at her place and supplies her with steroids to give her an edge in the competition. But the violence of Lou's family looms over them both — and love, rage, sweat and steroids make for an explosive combination.

Will you like it?

Love Lies Bleeding feels like a lost '80s movie, if the '80s had been more open to pulpy LGBTQ romance. Its use of the period setting is admirably subtle: There are dolphin shorts and princess phones but no nostalgia-bait needle drops, only a selection of obscure period tunes and a throbbing score by Clint Mansell.

The earliest giveaway that we're in the past? The stenciled signs posted all over the gym extolling the benefits of pain. In the austere and unsettling Saint Maud, Glass explored the connection between religion and masochism, self-harm and sainthood. Self-harm is a thread running through Love Lies Bleeding, too, but this story, with its familiar genre elements, offers the audience less tension and more catharsis.

Here, self-destructive behavior comes with an adrenaline rush. Glass uses the period setting to take us back to a time before we were alert to the perils of eating disorders and toxic gym culture — when moviegoers unironically worshipped Sylvester Stallone's dripping pecs in the Rambo and Rocky movies, and even stars such as Matthew Modine and Jamie Lee Curtis got training montages.

With her formidable physique, dewy eyes and Colgate smile, O'Brian embodies an ideal of the era, part Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day and part Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. The modern twist is that Jackie is happily bisexual and prone to hulking out in a way seldom seen since the Lou Ferrigno TV version of "The Incredible Hulk" — complete with bulging muscle close-ups and sound effects.

We've seen countless variations on this plot before. Stewart convincingly plays a female version of the tough guy trying to make a quiet life for himself, while O'Brian is the femme fatale who disrupts that plan, Malone is the damsel in distress, Franco is the dirtbag, and Harris is the heavy. The screenplay, by Glass and Weronika Tofilska, has a grubby efficiency, sketching the characters in broad strokes that serve to make them iconic without making them terribly interesting.

Yet a vein of David Lynch-style surrealism lifts Love Lies Bleeding above its foundation of noir pastiche. Like Jackie, the movie has a youthful bravado that is impossible to look away from.

Glass works from a base of kitchen-sink realism: handheld camerawork, a shot inside a dingy lobster tank to remind us the characters are trapped. Then she adds moments that dip straight into the protagonists' fevered fantasy lives. Saint Maud features similarly vertiginous gaps between its heroine's fantasies and reality, with a last shot that returns us jarringly, horrifyingly to the literal world. But in Love Lies Bleeding, the awakenings feel gentler, almost whimsical — if you don't mind your whimsy mixed with graphic gore and a few broken teeth.

Love Lies Bleeding is a crowd-pleaser, assuming the crowd in question enjoys sex, violence and the triumph of the underdog. Far from offering "positive role models," as movies about LGBTQ characters used to be expected to do, this one refreshingly gives its protagonists free rein to be chaotic, difficult and delusional. To some extent, it even rewards them for it, wearing its contempt for heteronormativity on its sleeve. Like the stuff that Jackie injects, the movie may come with a lot of necessary warning labels, but it will pump you up.

If you like this, try...

Saint Maud (2019; MGM+, Prime Video, rentable): In Glass' first feature, a young hospice nurse (Morfydd Clark, in an award-winning performance) believes she has the power to save her patient's soul.

Bound (1996; Kanopy, Pluto TV, rentable): One precedent for the lesbian noir genre is this gritty cult film from directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski (before their breakout with The Matrix) in which Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly plan a heist while falling in love.

Female Trouble (1974; rentable): In an interview on rogerebert.com, Glass said one influence on Love Lies Bleeding and its arc of "finding liberation through transgression" was this John Waters camp classic in which Divine plays a teenage delinquent. It's a wild (and very funny) ride.