Union County Might Just Break Your Heart

There are few better movies to see at a festival than ones in which a longtime, reliable supporting-character actor finally gets their chance to step into the spotlight. Such is the case with Will Poulter in Adam Meeks’s debut feature, Union County, one of the best films out of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. In the movie, set in the rolling hills of Meeks’s native central Ohio, a group of addicts get a second (or third or fourth) chance to make right in their lives. Among these addicts are brothers Cody (Poulter) and Jack Parsons (Noah Centineo), navigating the same court-mandated drug-rehabilitation program in an attempt to get clean and back on track. What distinguishes Union County from a standard addiction narrative is that Poulter and Centineo are flanked by nonactors, the overall effect hovering somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. The result is mesmerizing and harrowing, as the effects of the country’s ongoing opioid crisis don’t have to be dramatized so much as seen.

At first glance, Poulter may not seem like the type to pass as an Ohioan, but as our critic Bilge Ebiri put it during the festival, “With his hangdog face and perpetually watchful eyes, Poulter makes for an ideal outsider: He looks like he’s always trying to figure out how the universe works.” He approaches the role with the quiet dignity of someone eager to do right in a world where temptation and suffering seem boundless. Centineo, on the other hand, is a sharp dramatic foil: effervescent and outgoing, almost unrecognizable. The most remarkable performance in the film, however, may be that of real-life counselor Annette Deao, whose firm hand and sympathetic guidance lend Union County its stoic nature. Rather than succumb to the misery of its subject matter, Union County is about the quiet, tedious, and remarkable work that is getting and staying sober — the final product a testament to all that can be achieved.

Union County will be out in theaters in New York and Los Angeles on August 14, with a nationwide rollout to follow.