The characters must act, both alone and together, in a hostile world.

True Grit opens with a courtroom scene followed quickly by a public hanging. Both scenes end in uncertainty as to what the truth really is and who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

In court, what appears to be a classic confrontation between a cagey, one-eyed lawman and a slick lawyer, twisting words to free his low-life client, ends with the hero unable to speak coherently, probably because he killed an unarmed man then fibbed to cover it up.

At the hanging, two of the condemned men give their final speeches, casting doubt on whether the law is punishing the right men. When the third man, a Native American, begins his speech, he is rudely cut off as the executioner jerks a death hood over his face and the gallows floor swings open. Had anyone ever heard his side of the story?

The frontier town may be struggling to establish justice in difficult circumstances, but we are given little sign that it’s a clear success. Into the midst of these proceedings, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) comes–confident, brisk and precocious–looking for help. She intends to bring her father’s killer, Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), to justice or to take justice to him.

Her incandescent certainty does not flicker at the setting, where truth is uncertain and elusive, making justice seem no more than a gamble. She knows the truth–what happened and who did what. The film’s opening epigraph cites the proverb, “The wicked flee when no one pursues.” She does not flee, but she does pursue.

Through will and wit, Mattie manages to hire the craggy and drunken U.S. Marshall, Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), to join her quest. Before they begin, Cogburn partners up with LaBoeff, a high-minded Texas Ranger (Matt Damon) who wants to bring Chaney back to his own state where he can claim the reward. This conflicts with Mattie’s goal, which requires that Chaney be held accountable for her father’s death rather than standing trial for murdering some Texas senator. For her, this is not the abstract justice of nation states, but the personal justice that precedes it.

The three characters with their divergent and mixed goals don’t readily cohere into a team. Nonetheless, they do cohere, held together by a mixture of the men’s self-interest, their pride, a rough nobility, and an undeniable though always coy sense of chivalry. (Their comedic banter, which really is funny, highlights sharp differences that at times drive them apart. The dialogue is witty and sharp, and one of the film’s delights is an old-fashioned English of impressive poetry and subtlety, which Barry Pepper, who plays outlaw “Lucky Pepper” in the film, calls “hillbilly Shakespeare.” Author of the original novel, Charles Portis, said he learned it while studying old Arkansas newspapers, from an age when people learned to read using the King James Bible and Shakespeare.)

There’s also Mattie’s attractiveness. At the beginning, LaBoeff is tempted to “steal a kiss,” and though Mattie suggests she would find that as unpleasant as the spanking he is also tempted to give her, her pure determination continues to light up the dark wilderness where the two men find that her plight and her quest have become their own.

They make their way through a western state of nature, populated mainly by violent gangs and individual misfits. It’s a state before civilization, where when a man dies people matter-of-factly convert his body to a commodity for possible trade. Nothing there is sacred. Mattie tells us that “You must pay for everything in this world one way and another. There is nothing free with the exception of God’s grace.” The sky and the rain might come through God’s grace, but as for justice, someone was going to have to pay the cost. Mattie, on her own, decides that she will pay that cost.

The story’s power emerges from her ability to attract both strong men into her battle, and from their willingness to be drawn in. Rooster deals with the world as it comes, and when Mattie comes, he doesn’t always hide his delight. Though her intelligence, courage, resourcefulness and aggression make her formidable on her own, as the story unfolds she loses control of the situation and finds herself facing trouble that’s more formidable than she is. But she also finds that her quest is no longer hers alone.

The men she has somewhat unaccountably found both put their considerable strength and skill in service to her quest, at great personal risk. At key moments they find themselves–through luck or providence–just where they need to be to help each other. They form a little community that exists, barely sometimes, at a level of grace somewhat higher than the other communities they encounter–where a man kills his partner to gain a temporary advantage, where when the chips are down a gang abandons one of its members according to selfish calculations.

The three characters get little reprieve from struggles against real trouble. They pay quite steep costs–moving as they do in a world of ambushes, snakepits and the like–but slowly and painfully, they reveal to us that justice is also possible, for those who choose it.