Union County

Director Adam Meeks partnered with an Adult Recovery Court in Bellefontaine in his home region of rural Ohio for Union County, a hybrid doc-fiction approach that brings a startlingly truthful naturalism and gritty authenticity to his emotionally raw feature debut about America’s epidemic of opioid addiction. Meeks, who studied filmmaking in New York and expanded the film from a 2020 short of the same name, charts the struggles of those in a program for substance use disorders, that’s a last-stop before prison time or consequences that are even more irreversible.

The Sundance-premiered rehabilitation drama, which screens at the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg in Germany, stars a convincing Will Poulter in the central role as Cody Parsons, an addict who has been living in his car. Cody has been using hard drugs since the age of seventeen, and is newly trying to get clean after years of chaos and legal troubles. He lands in a program with his foster brother Jack (Noah Centineo), who is immersed in a similar struggle. Initially Jack seems the unruly, messier ringleader, but a more complex picture emerges as details of the family’s past gradually come out in a story that also shows the impact on their long-suffering sister Kat (Emily Meade.)

The film opens with testimonials of progress delivered from a court lectern to a supervising judge by real-life participants in a step-based initiative with a rigid protocol including daily drug-testing. In more informal support sessions, non-professional cast members in recovery share intimate thoughts and reflections with one another. Poulter and Centineo seamlessly blend into these settings, in scenes that impart a real sense of what is at stake, the role of structured community in breaking out of cycles of addiction, and the difficulties those dependent on substances face opening themselves up to a full range of feelings again. Poulter is prickly, guarded and diffident, and initially emotionally checked-out, in a performance striking in its credibility.

Of course for this to have hook as a story, serious blips in the road must appear. Months of court-supported progress are not without setbacks and worse for Cody, as he transitions out of homelessness into a sober house, tries to make amends with his sister, and embarks on new shift work at a local lumber mill that is a core source of labour in this blue-collar community.

The initial crisis moment for brothers Cody and Jack erupts in particularly shocking fashion, deftly staged to offer a non-glamourised sense of the unpredictable havoc that a life in active addiction is, in which serious bodily harm is always just one bad, impulsive decision away. The will-he-or-won’t he narrative around quitting drugs, a non-judgmental cautionary tale of sorts, is straightforward in its plotting, but acquires power in the nuanced textures of guilt and compulsion that its characters so credibly embody. A love interest is present in the form of recovering addict and now mentor Anna (Elise Kibler), though this potential is kept to the sidelines as romance is off-limits to those new in the program. It’s warm, older sponsor Annette (Annette Deao, a real chemical dependency counsellor) who ably shoulders some of the gravity of more pivotal scenes.

D.O.P. Stefan Weinberger favours steady, unfussy frames that do not jostle in too claustrophobically with the protagonists, opening up a certain degree of observational distance that allows us to take in this rural setting and the community constellations that underpin it.

Among a recent outpouring of US independent films attempting to tackle the opioid crisis and increase awareness of the seriousness of the issue while humanising those suffering at its heart, Union County deserves to be seen as one tied exceptionally closely into the realities of the recovery community that is hopeful yet unvarnished and clear-eyed. While its social-issue credentials are strong, it is a compelling drama on its own terms of one man’s life at a critical juncture, albeit one that remains unembellished and baldly to-the-point, in its admirable determination to sidestep cheap sensationalism.

Director, writer: Adam Meeks
Editors: Sean Weiner, Adam Meeks
Cinematographer: Stefan Weinberger
Producers: Brad Becker-Parton, Martha Gregory, Stephanie Roush, Faye Tsakas, Sean Weiner, Tim Headington, Theresa Steele Page, Ellyn Daniels, Will O’Connor, Will Poulter
Cast: Will Poulter, Noah Centineo, Elise Kibler, Emily Meade, Annette Deao
Music: Celia Hollander
Production companies: Seaview (US), Arkhum Productions (US), Ley Line Entertainment (US), Burn These Words (US), Kindred Spirit (US)
Sales: Oscilloscope Laboratories
Venue: Mannheim-Heidelberg
In English
97 minutes