The idea of turning a song into a feature film is long overdue. I can think of a dozen candidates for future features, from artists like Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen, and Rush. If this Cape Breton picture spawns more of this kind of thing, that will be a hell of a legacy. It is, indeed, inspired by Adam Baldwin’s “Lighthouse In Little Lorraine,” and Baldwin is credited as co-screenwriter with first-time feature director Andy Hines.

If you know the song you know the story: Cape Breton 1986, Jimmy (Stephen Amell) and his buddies (Joshua Close and Steve Lund) are out-of-work coal miners when family black sheep, Uncle Huey (Stephen McHattie) comes back to town with an offer of a job — working on a lobster boat. That turns out pretty well forJimmy and his family at first, though when it comes clear that Huey’s actually part of a cocaine smuggling operation, Jimmy keeps that secret from his wife, Emma (Auden Thornton), but the guilt of a life of crime takes a toll on them all.

There’s something none-more-Nova Scotian that the wheels of this crime drama hang on those good Cape Breton boys being too nice to make decent drug smugglers, but the folksy home-life domesticity of kids birthdays and kitchen parties bumps awkwardly against the crime thriller elements until one becomes the other. In the final 10 minutes, we get an outrageous, unseeded moment that could’ve come right out of The Godfather or Goodfellas — the filmmakers keep you guessing.

Little Lorraine also offers McHattie another high point in a sprawling career full of them — his Huey is the dark heart of this fable and is absolutely terrifying.