Two years ago, Neil LaBute, the bad boy button-pusher of cinema who has lately been more the rage onstage than on-screen, unveiled a remake of Robin Hardy’s 1973 men-versus-women thriller “The Wicker Man.” Cast largely with small-time actors, Mr. LaBute’s version nonetheless starred Nicolas Cage, who wound up digging a ham hole so deep that the entire movie slid down with him and became a giggle-inducing exercise in high camp. Now Mr. LaBute is back with another hot-button thriller, this time about black-versus-white, and it’s Samuel L. Jackson in the lead role. The lesson? What a difference an actor makes.

In “Lakeview Terrace,” the match is first set to the powder keg when a young interracial couple moves into the eponymous upper-middle-class subdivision next door to Abel Turner, a Los Angeles cop played by Mr. Jackson. Chris (Patrick Wilson) is white, while his wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) is black, and this gets up the nose of Turner for reasons we don’t ever quite understand, though when Chris regrettably invokes Rodney King’s infamous “Can’t we all get along?” mantra in an attempt to placate an edgy Abel, we can see where a certain bitterness may reside. Reveling in the mere thought of being a new homeowner, Chris tosses his cigarette butts around the driveway like confetti, he and Lisa get it on in their pool in plain view of Turner’s teenage children, and Chris plays rap music loudly in his car.

Slowly, and with increasing menace, Abel makes it clear that these young, liberal, mixed-race youngsters aren’t welcome in his neighborhood. While his smiles get bigger and his “aw shucks” manner becomes more ingratiating, the menace grows deeper. As approaching wildfires scour the hillsides, the movie becomes a tense, unnerving home-ownership nightmare with a gooey nougat center of race relations.

Well shot but deliberately unstylish, with most of its characters briefly sketched instead of carefully painted, “Lakeview Terrace” is a platter serving up Mr. Jackson’s performance. Considering the subject matter and his highly excitable character, he is given more than enough rope with which to hang himself. Instead, Mr. Jackson delivers his most nuanced performance in nearly a decade, at least since 2000’s “Unbreakable.” Turner is emotionally locked down, and the only glimpses we get of his real feelings are brief flickers behind his eyes, like shadows passing before a window. Everything else he does — the way he moves, walks, and talks, the things he says and the stories he tells — is a lie.

Late in the movie, Turner breaks down at a bar and tells Chris a long, emotional story about his wife. This would be the point in most movies when viewers come to understand the villain’s tragic backstory, the tale of What Happened To Make Me So Mean. But in “Lakeview Terrace,” it all shockingly turns out to be completely untrue, and an example of more manipulation and sick game-playing. We never understand why Turner is the way he is; we never get his biography, and that’s okay because, as played by Mr. Jackson, we don’t need it. We just need to understand that he exists. Turner is there, and he poisons everything he touches. In his few unguarded moments of humanity, we even understand that he’s poisoned himself. But don’t get depressed, because this is Samuel L. Jackson at his most entertaining, and he steals scene after scene, transforming them into his own personal set pieces.

In the last half hour of the film, guns are pulled, conspiracies are unmasked, and blows are struck, and it’s all so much less satisfying than the stomach-clenching anticipation that came before. This car was running just fine, but the traditional conventions of Hollywood thrillers eventually punch a hole in the gas tank. It still crosses the finish line, but it’s moving a lot slower when it gets there.

The real movie happens in the accumulation of details, for better or worse. Chris’s lacrosse scholarship, his outdoor fire pit, his love of white zinfandel, and his job at a high-end grocery store with “an environmental agenda” all contribute to a paranoid version of the hit Web log “Things White People Like.”

But Mr. Jackson’s performance overshadows the disturbing cultural undertow: You can’t dislike a movie that gives him a stage this big on which to strut his stuff. Unlike “The Wicker Man,” we don’t get anything as crazy and fun as a bear getting punched in the face. But unlike “The Wicker Man,” this time we actually get a good movie.