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The movie's first hour is highly atmospheric throat-clearing, establishing the responsibility that Russell Baze (Bale) feels his family. His widowed father is dying. His younger brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) has a gambling problem and has fallen in with a very bad crowd that includes local nightclub owner and criminal fixer John Petty (Dafoe) and Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a New Jersey hillbilly who lives in the forested Ramopo mountains with his criminal gang. "Out of the Furnace" begins with a shocking scene of Harlan sexually terrorizing a date at a drive in, then savagely beating a man who tries to intervene. The scene effectively establishes that Harlan is a man not to be messed with, but it also has a whiff of macho art house pretension, as if the harrowing ending of William Friedkin's "Killer Joe" had been put at the beginning of that story instead; and it wasn't necessary, as Harrelson exudes menace regardless.

Russell is positioned as a figure who suffers for the sins of others. When the film opens, he has a loving girlfriend named Lena (Zoe Saldana) and decent job at the mill (even though the economic crash of 2008, an increasingly important event in recent American cinema, is scaring everyone to death).