Every week, Annette Deao, a drug dependency counselor, sits in the county jail and offers incarcerated people in rural Ohio a chance at recovery. One bright day she meets Cody, a young man who shuffles towards the lectern and quietly says that he’s ready to give it a shot. Though the film is led by Poulter and Noah Centineo as foster brothers taking steps to get clean, much of the supporting cast is made up of first-time actors who share their real – and often painful and non-linear – stories of recovery.
The hybrid of narrative feature and documentary-esque elements combine in a deeply affecting watch that is anchored by Poulter’s natural-feeling approach to the role. I think that’s the reason they were so generous.” Far too often, Hollywood gets its stories of addiction wrong, with surface-level treatment in misfires such as Beautiful Boy, Ben Is Back and Hillbilly Elegy. After seeing Meeks’s contemplative 2020 short film of the same name, which also collaborated with Bellefontaine locals, Poulter felt sure that Union County would do justice to the subject.
It has an over 50% success rate which is phenomenal – incomparable in some ways – so it was really about platforming that above all else.” Since breaking out as a child star in 2007 in British comedy Son of Rambow, Poulter has traded teenage parts in centrist Hollywood fare such as We’re The Millers and The Maze Runner for subtle, sturdy work in auteur-driven projects such as Ari Aster’s Midsommar, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit and Alejandro G Iñárritu’s The Revenant as well as receiving Emmy nominations for turns in TV shows Dopesick and The Bear. Poulter is undoubtedly dedicated to his work – in a trait which has seen him undergoing rigorous chef training for The Bear and an intense workout regimen for Marvel’s Guardians of The Galaxy Vol 3 – but also has a taste for the unexpected. In the past year, he has canoodled with a Haim sister in the band’s All Over Me video, played a stuck-up boutique manager in I Love Boosters and guest judged on RuPaul’s Drag Race vs The World.
Union County is the best showcase to date of Poulter’s ability to inhabit a character’s skin. At the start of the film Cody is broken down, near mute and blinking heavily as if he’s still trying to comprehend how he ended up here. You can imagine another actor over-doing it, but there’s an unshowy confidence to Poulter’s performance that captures the the young man’s quiet pride: he may live out of his car, but spends evenings hand washing his clothes and drying them on a line rigged between trees.
With Meeks’s precise instinct for detail, Union County is grounded enough to make its flickers of hope feel earned. Most memorable of the first-time actors is Daeo, whose kind but firm counsellor becomes a parental figure to Cody as he gets back on track. That’s shame on us for stigmatizing people in that position.” Filming the movie sounds almost unbearably heavy.
As an actor I was simulating these experiences and I went home every night, whereas the real participants are in an 18-month program and the work and recovery is never done. So however it was for me, it pales in comparison to what it was like for the real participants.” Despite promises by Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, a recent report found that the Trump administration has cut more than $1bn in federal funding to mental health and addiction programs. They don’t think about the eviction that forced somebody onto the street.” Poulter has often spoken up about political causes and publicly supports Palestine as well as migrant and LGBTQ+ rights.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
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