John Kennedy Toole was one of those literary phenomena. Best known for the much optioned/never filmed Confederacy of Dunces, his first book - The Neon Bible - was written when he was just 16, but languished unknown until its publication two decades after his suicide in 1969. A slim but charged volume, it tells the tale of David, a teenager growing up in the South. Here he is witness to poverty and hardship, a brutal father, and the sparky friendship that sweeps through his life in shape of Aunt Mae, a charismatic, never-quite-was bar-room chanteuse. When his father is killed in the war, his mother gradually loses her mind, and David learns too much too soon about the adult world.

Ostensibly then a very American subject, and as such about as far as it is possible to get from the small, very British films of the Liverpool born Terence Davies. And yet to look again is to see more and more in Toole to parallel those thinly disguised autobiographical pieces: here is another a young boy, like Davies, with a bullying father who dies leaving him to be brought up by women. And thus did Davies decamp to the States, commute novel to script, and set about putting the book on film in his own, very unique way.

Painters like Rockwell and Hopper are immediately invoked by Mick Coulter's luminous 'Scope photography. Davies knows what the film should look like, where to place his camera, and thus this is instantly a Terence Davies Film. In an age of cut-cut-cut editing, this is one director not afraid to tarry, to track his camera with slow deliberation. Anyone that recalls the infamous carpet shot in his last, the brilliant The Long Day Closes, will find its counterpart in a lingering shot of a flapping bedsheet here (played to 'Tara's Theme' from Gone With The Wind). It's not quite as remarkable as the Axminster, but is worth waiting for.

All of this is fine as far as it goes, but even (especially) an artist like Davies needs strong performers to pull things into focus, and here he is blessed with the presence of John Cassavetes' widow, the fabulous Gena Rowlands, as Mae. Never seen on screen enough, Rowlands' pitch-perfect performance dominates the picture with her faded glamour and plain humanity. And there is strong playing too from Diana Scarwid and (oddly) lippy comic Denis Leary as the boy's parents.

The problem, if problem there is, rests with Jacob Tierney's David. Davies badly needs a player of the standing of young Leigh McCormack in The Long Day Closes, someone who can command the centre of his picture even when doing very little. But where McCormack was doing everything by doing nothing, Tierney too often comes across as vacant. Without him, the picture cannot emotionally engage its audience as effectively as Davies' previous work - and emotion in these films is all.

The Neon Bible is then the least of this fascinating director's work. Which is not to say it's a poor film; there are many exceptional things - the almost hallucinatory sequence of racial violence; the astonishing tented revivalist meeting that recalls nothing so much as David Lynch; the lustrous, elegiac finale. But in the end, The Neon Bible doesn't so much add to this wonderful film-maker's distinctive cannon as simply confirm everything we already knew. Now is perhaps time for that thriller he's been talking up so long.