In its defiantly plainspoken way, director Clint Eastwood’s “Juror #2” is full of surprises, and even the ones heavy with contrivance and coincidence-based plotting settle into the overall and rather sneaky effectiveness of the movie. It’s one of his good ones. Small, modest, a little stodgy. But good, and even a little brave in its courtroom-drama willingness to dunk the audience in the main character’s soup of anxiety almost immediately.

That’s the first surprise in “Juror #2,” and while it may sound like major spoiler material, it’s not, because it’s all over the trailer and wastes little time emerging in the movie. In Savannah, Georgia, a murder trial is underway. A man is accused of killing his girlfriend after an arguably violent confrontation in a roadside bar at night, with rain and thunder for added dramatics.

Nicholas Hoult plays the title juror, a magazine writer recovering from alcohol addiction, with a child on the way. The usual questions arise in jury selection: Do you have any “personal relationship with the accused”? He answers no. He’s agitated, though; he doesn’t want to have his time carved away from his wife’s imminent delivery.

And there’s something else. Driving home one night recently, this man, Justin, had the bad luck to strike a deer crossing the road, which apparently (the flashbacks tell us) limped off into the woods. But this is not what really happened, which screenwriter Jonathan A. Abrams clarifies at a daringly early point in the story.

Not everything’s out in the open, though. Like any courtroom drama, even an off-center one, other jurors harbor other suspicions, other secrets. J.K. Simmons plays a retired Midwestern police detective (Chicago, I think) whose experience leads him to doubt the prosecution’s case. Toni Collette takes the role of the prosecutor with political ambitions; her adversary in court, and her drinking buddy outside it, is the defense attorney portrayed by Chris Messina.

At this point I’m going to quit with the plot summary, because I respect incremental reveals a lot more than does the Warner Bros. marketing team. It’s enough to say that “Juror #2” presents a life-changing dilemma for Justin and his family. He is clearly a loyal husband and very likely a good parent in the making. He is also faced with a couple of extremely difficult designs for living, one a lie, the other the truth. He’s not alone in facing a crossroads of conscience in Eastwood’s film.

For me, “Juror #2” holds together even though some of the narrative developments don’t, and there’s a reason for that. Many, though not all, of Eastwood’s recent films as director boil down to a simple, shared theme of noble men whose acts of courage run afoul of everything wrong with America: the sniveling media (“Richard Jewell”), big government bureaucracy (“Sully”) or, in the case of Eastwood’s biggest hit, “American Sniper,” post-traumatic stress disorder, insufficiently cared for by both the man, a fictionalized version of Chris Kyle, and the military apparatus surrounding his short life.

“Juror #2” is a completely different undertaking — an unpretentious genre exercise, well-acted by Hoult and Collette, especially. Yet its ethical morass holds you. Its rooting interests are not fixed. Some of it’s a mite preposterous, once the flashbacks to what really happened get going in the later stages. But I can see why Eastwood went for it; it’s old-style but with some odd wrinkles. I hope it finds an audience. Courtroom dramas, after all, remain one of the hardiest genres in filmmaking, even now, when studios no longer know or care about selling a mid-budget ’90s-style courtroom drama in theaters.

To wit: Eastwood’s movie, which may be his finale, is opening in theaters in glaringly limited release. Thirty-one theaters, at last count. In the entire country. Originally slated for a streaming bow on Max, which is a business unit of Warner Bros. Discovery, “Juror #2” may well be unfashionable enough to make money theatrically. Warner Bros. is essentially guaranteeing that outcome now.

Loyalty to Eastwood is one thing, and maybe a sentimental thing. But the movie itself, cannily handled, deserved a better shot for a better reason: It works.

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'JUROR #2'

3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for some violent images and strong language)

Running time: 1:53

How to watch: Now in theaters

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