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. “His self-respect is in the basement,” said Will Poulter, the British actor who plays the character. “He doesn’t like or accept himself enough to embark on helping himself.”
Union County review – an affecting Will Poulter lifts quiet addiction drama
Read more
Directed by Adam Meeks, an Ohio native, Union County is a bruising yet poetic depiction of a real life drug recovery court in Bellefontaine, Ohio, where individuals join long-term treatment programs with daily sobriety testing. 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.
“It was clear to me from the outset that Adam wasn’t interested in making a film about a community as he was in making it in with a community,” Poulter said, speaking via Zoom a few days before Union County’s US release. “Top of mind was not interfering with the recovery process and not infringing on the path that the participants were walking. 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. “In the representation of addiction on screen there is a tendency to focus on devastation and the negative side of things,” Poulter said. “What I appreciated about Adam’s approach was that it was more weighted on the success of the program. 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.