Actors Will Poulter and Noah Centineo, who both also helped produce Union County, undoubtedly personally enabled this cinema-verité story of rural American drug addiction to get made. Large parts of Union County were filmed in a real drug court with the court’s workers and the court’s service users playing all the relevant parts. The focus is less on the specific brothers at its center and more about the systems of addiction and recovery as a whole. Unfortunately Union County’s core weakness is as American as the story it is telling, which limits the film’s appeal to its glimpses of the real lives at the story’s edge.
We never learn why Cody (Mr. Poulter) has been mandated to participate in a drug court program that will last 18 months and ideally return him to society a sober and self-sufficient citizen. But we do learn he is living in his car and his only family are two foster siblings – a sister, Katrina (Emily Meade), who can barely stand to have Cody around, and a brother, Jack (Mr. Centineo), who sees Cody in court for the first time in years. Jack is an amiable presence, well-liked by everybody in the recovery program, and thrilled to reconnect with his brother. Jack goes so far to get Cody a job in the sawmill where he also works, and the brothers start hanging out again, just like in the old days. But like in the old days, that leads to nothing good.
What writer-director Adam Meeks is exploring here are the rituals and rhythms of recovery in a world where the legal framework of the drug court is the only kindness on offer. Now he’s in the program, Cody’s time is full of group therapy meetings and celebrations of the most basic life achievements (getting a driver’s license, having a pleasant family dinner) of his colleagues in recovery. All the participants also have regular appointments before a judge where their life’s most intimate personal problems are discussed in open court. There’s a very specific kind of attitude on unusual display here, and that’s not just speaking of the ‘summer teeth’. The mood of the whole film is a roiling mix of self-pity, passivity, embarrassment, shame and deference seasoned with anger and occasional defiance. Can somebody have a couple beers at a campfire party without their entire life backsliding? Is that a risk worth taking? Or are the structures of a program, which can send you to jail if you don’t comply, the only reason these people can maintain their sobriety? The repeated message is that addicts can only surmount the problems of their addictions and therefore clean up the rest of their lives by submitting to the recovery program and doing its work. Some of the people Cody meets, such as the nice lady named Anna (Elise Kibler) who is training to be a therapist and desperate to regain custody of her child, have excellent reasons for being gung-ho. Others are not so sure.
This all seems like an enormous amount of trouble for a sense of community, but in this part of America this is the community there is. And this is definitely an American film, is that there’s no attempt whatsoever to look for a larger, systemic, maybe even class-based pattern to the problems here. It is simply a series of individual, unconnected coincidences that all these people in this county became addicted to drugs, and there’s no sense of irony whatever that government-funded help is only offered to them through the rock bottom of this recovery program. A smarter film would have delved into this a little more.
That said, Mr. Poulter, an Englishman who was expensively privately educated as a child and whose distinctive looks have been the focus of his acting career, is clearly trading off his work in blockbusters with more thoughtful indie fare to build himself a fascinating career. His work in Union County clearly helped bring it to the Sundance Film Festival but also will get it distribution elsewhere in the world. Most people outside of America, whose knowledge of the country is limited to mainstream entertainments, still can’t imagine that in the wealthiest country in the world there are uncounted numbers of people who live like this. If nothing else, it might help them better appreciate what they have.
Union County recently played at the Sundance Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
You might also like…
‘Filipiñana’ – Visual Aesthetic Makes it an Instant Classic (Berlinale 2026 Film Review)