All this is a tall order, and some of the telling works better than others. “Free State of Jones” merits respect for what it is attempting to do, and it mostly holds interest, although one can grow impatient with its length, method and what’s left unexplored.

The film begins with Civil War slaughter as the Confederate army men march senselessly against positioned Union soldiers with superior firepower. We see devastating, stomach-turning bloodshed. The film settles into the story of Matthew McConaughey as the real-life Newton Knight, a poor farmer in the southern army, who sees his conscripted son die in battle and begins to have his doubts about fighting for a cause that he finds benefits wealthy slave-holding farmers rather than poor folk like him from Jones County, Mississippi. McConaughey exhibits his well-known actor chops in his portrayal of an imposing figure who displays integrity, compassion and bravery.

Knight leads a gathering revolt, with disgruntled whites merging with escaped slaves, seeking refuge in a swamp area difficult for Confederate troops to penetrate. Maherashala Ali is excellent as escaped slave Moses, a force of vibrant dignity and courage in this band of rebels.

Knight and Rachel, an escaped, sexually abused slave, sympathetically portrayed by Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who is aiding the group, bond and it is clear that their relationship will turn intimate. To the film’s credit, the sex between them is implied, even when they become a couple, rather than exploited. But it is weird when Knight, Serena (Keri Russell), his first wife, and Rachel move into the same household together in peace and harmony. (I’d like to have been there to observe such cooperation.)

The film’s biggest muddle is the forward leaps of 85 years into a Mississippi trial in which Davis Knight, defiantly played by Brian Lee Franklin, a descendent of the relationship between Knight and Rachel, is determined to be of mixed blood and in violation of the state’s anti-miscegenation law with his marriage to a white woman. The trial issue would work better as an addendum to the war and Reconstruction era saga instead of mixing it up and dramatically intruding on the earlier story.