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There are a lot of secrets hiding out there in the bayou. One of them being why Ruby Delacroix named her honky-tonk Ruby's Bucket of Blood. I guess it's a Southern thing, but it doesn't sound like a cozy spot to me.

Perhaps Ruby knew Julie Hebert would want to write a play one day, and that the play would be turned into a movie for Showtime (tonight at 8), and it would need an eye-catching title. "Ruby's Bucket of Blood" is a Southern Gothic tale as tangled and smothering as kudzu, and Hebert, who also wrote the screenplay, keeps it screeching toward the brink of melodrama.

Angela Bassett (who produced the film) stars as the lovely Ruby, a woman disappointed by life and the cold heart of her husband, Earl (Brian Stokes Mitchell). She wears her bitterness like an old housecoat, weary of work and life in segregated 1960 Louisiana. A black woman is a "nursemaid, whore and mule rolled up into one," she tells her rebellious 15-year-old daughter (Jurnee Smollett). "When you learn to stay low, you'll be all right."

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Trouble arrives not just in threes but in fours. Her daughter is fixin' to run away, her man is mean and about to decamp, and the lead singer in the house band has replaced himself with, of all things, a good-looking white guy named Billy Dupre (Kevin Anderson). And Billy, of course, has a blond wife (Angelica Torn) who is crazy and drunk and has Trouble written all over her in big capital letters. She has secrets, too.

Being a white man in a black bar in Louisiana in 1960 was almost as bad as the reverse, apparently, but somehow Dupre wins his audience and suffers no ill effects. At least not from a racial cause. The first three-fourths of the film is larded with music -- all of it pretty darn good blues and zydeco. (Howard Chen and Jarelle Christie are credited as "guest musicians.") No matter how good the music, however, this is supposed to be a movie, not a concert, and there are a few songs too many.

There's a subplot about another secret: Two of Ruby's male friends are homosexual lovers. Silas wants to move to New Orleans where the two can live openly, but Johnny does not want to leave his home or his role as host to every musician in town. "I'm a man from a place. . . . Family and friends come first. I'm a homosexual second," he says.

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Billy is attracted to Ruby like an opossum to a truck's wheels, and of course there is hell to pay. But she does find a kind of release from her life of pain, and by the end she has lost her fear. Bassett is rather stately and stiff as Ruby, and her love scenes with the appealing Anderson are passionless. Mitchell is wasted in his small role as mean ol' Earl, but Smollett is endearing as the teenage daughter. The real acting in the piece is done by Torn (she's Rip's daughter, and looks it). She changes from sultry to slack, and from desperate to drained with real artistry.

Angela Bassett plays blues-bar owner Ruby Delacroix in Showtime's "Ruby's Bucket of Blood," about life and troubles in 1960s Louisiana.

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