“Americans,” noted Oscar Wilde while passing near Jesse James’s hometown on an 1882 lecture tour, “are certainly great hero-worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.” Wilde wasn’t wrong, but the truth is not so simple. It would be more accurate to say that when faced with a criminal they regard as a hero, many Americans simply choose to disregard his criminality.

Based on Ron Hansen’s great 1983 novel, “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” Andrew Dominik’s brilliant, brooding film, which opens Friday, more closely resembles in mood and tone such classics as “Bonnie and Clyde” and “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” than traditional Westerns. This is altogether appropriate, since Jesse James had little in common with a classic frontier shooter like Billy the Kid, aside from their having died less than a year apart. As T.J. Stiles points out in his 2002 biography, “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War,” “Jesse himself looks South, not West; he, his brother, and his bandit colleagues were proud products of the Confederate war effort.” The Confederate cause was their rationalization for an unbroken series of bank and train robberies for the next 17 years as far south as Alabama and as far east as Virginia.

Jesse Woodson James was born in Clay County, Mo., in 1847 in what Mr. Stiles calls “the most hotly ideological era in American history,” and in the border state destined to be the site of the most vicious internecine fighting of the Civil War. One does not have to sympathize with either James or his Confederate sentiments to agree with his apologists that the boy was fated at birth to be a killer. “It was,” writes Ted P. Yeatman, author of the popular dual biography, “Frank and Jesse James” (2000), “sort of like growing up in some parts of Iraq today.”

Jesse’s older, brother, Frank, rode with the infamous guerilla leader William Clark Quantrill, a man who, as revealed in Paul I. Wellman’s “A Destiny of Western Outlaws,” spawned an amazing lineage of crime that extended to the James associates the Younger brothers, later to the Dalton brothers (said by some to related by blood to both the Jameses and Youngers), and all the way to hitmen for the Kansas City branch of the Capone mob in the 1930s.

Jesse James was not, as Terrence Rafferty wrote in the September 16 New York Times, “in his short lifetime the most celebrated outlaw in the United States.” There’s no evidence that before his death he was more famous than either his brother Frank (with whom he shared space on the wanted posters) or his fellow gang member, Cole Younger. It was his assassination by gang member Robert Ford (paid by Missouri governor Thomas Crittenden, played knowingly by James Carville in Mr. Dominik’s film), that propelled Jesse to the forefront of American outlaws.

Nor is there any evidence that Jesse was the Robin Hood that the dime novelists and, later, Hollywood scriptwriters portrayed him as. His expressed idol was the Scottish rebel and forest outlaw “Sir William Wallace,” as he revealed in a letter to the Kansas City Times in 1872. In the words of Mr. Stiles, though, “From a modern perspective, he resembles Osama bin Laden more than either Robin Hood or Wallace.”

Jesse has inspired literature of high and low art. He, Frank, and the Youngers were among the first heroes of the dime novels and, a bit later, the stage, where “Jesse James Combinations” — dramatic depictions of his life and death coupled with readings of a semi-historical and biographical nature — were popular into the 20th century. In our own time, he has been the subject of a handful of first-rate works of fiction besides Mr. Hansen’s novel, including Will Henry’s “Death of a Legend” (1954), “The Chivalry of Crime” by the Welsh writer Desmond Barry (its title taken from a widespread editorial on James written immediately after his death), and Susan Dodd’s heartrending cult classic, “Mamaw” (1988), based on the life of Jesse’s mother, Zerelda.

But his legend has inspired some literary crosscurrents — the most curious of which are the Josey Wales novels, “Gone to Texas” and “The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales,” by Forrest Carter, aka Asa Carter, the white supremacist and one-time speechwriter for George Wallace. Carter’s novels, which were the basis of the Clint Eastwood film “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” deal with a super-projection of Jesse in the form of Josey, a beleaguered Missouri farmer who flees to Texas after the war, pursued by a vengeful “fedrul gov’mint.”

It’s been the movies, of course, that has kept Jesse’s name before the American public. The first Jesse James film, “Jesse James Under the Black Flag,” was released in 1921. Among its financial backers were members of the James family; needless to say, the movie was highly sympathetic to the Jameses, the Youngers, and the Confederacy.

In Henry King’s “Jesse James” (1939), with Tyrone Power as Jesse and Henry Fonda as Frank, the new villain is the encroaching railroad, which is stealing poor folks’ land. The Civil War is scarcely mentioned. Nicholas Ray’s “The True Story of Jesse James” (1957), with Robert Wagner as Jesse and Jeffrey Hunter as Frank, injects a “Rebel Without A Cause” flavor to Missouri in the Reconstruction period. (Ray had directed James Dean in “Rebel” just two yeas earlier, and had the star not died in a car crash, he most likely would have played Jesse.)

In Philip Kaufman’s quirky and complex “The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid” (1972), and in Walter Hill’s sturdy and exhilarating “The Long Riders” (1980), the character of Jesse is relegated to his original historical status as just one of the boys. Cole Younger, played in Kaufman’s film by Cliff Robertson and in Hill’s by David Carradine, seems more charismatic than Jesse, played, respectively, by Robert Duvall and James Keach.

The most recent Jesse James films, “Frank & Jesse” (made for TV, 1994) with Bill Paxton and Rob Lowe, and “American Outlaws” (2001), starring Colin Farrell, vie with “Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter” (1966), starring someone named John Lupton, for historical accuracy.

As Janet Margolin says in Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run,” it’s not who you kill, it’s who you know.” Cole Younger, who served a prison stretch after the botched robbery attempt in Northfield, Minn., wrote a fanciful autobiography. Frank James quit the outlaw business, beat all the legal raps thrown at him, and eventually became a co-host, along with Younger, of a traveling Wild West show. Today, except to scholars and buffs, Frank and Younger are footnotes to the story. Robert Ford, as the old folk songs says, laid Jesse in his grave, and in doing so turned him into someone whose fame will probably outlive that of any actor who plays him in a movie.