Synopsis: Two foster brothers land in the same county-mandated drug court program in rural Ohio, where recovery is less a triumph than a daily negotiation with everyone they have already hurt.
Stars: Will Poulter, Noah Centineo, Elise Kibler, Emily Meade, Annette Deao, Danny Wolohan
Director: Adam Meeks
Rated: Not Rated
Running Length: 97 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Adam Meeks puts two well-known actors inside a real drug court beside the people who actually work the program, and the seam never shows. No mountaintop, no doors blown off, just spirit and sad eyes. 
Union County Review: The Ohio Nobody Puts on a Poster:
Nostalgia knows no genre. Watching Union County, I kept sensing the presence of Kelly Reichardt, John Sayles, Barbara Loden, Chloé Zhao, Benh Zeitlin and Atom Egoyan. Those filmmakers understood lives that were never built for flash. Their characters weren’t destined for something better, and the films never apologized for that. They had dirt under their fingernails because they’d worked a full day, hadn’t showered in a week, or both.
Writer-director Adam Meeks finds those same people. He sets his film in rural Ohio during the opioid epidemic and follows two men who grew up together as foster brothers. Cody Parsons (Will Poulter, Midsommar) is one of them. His brother Jack (Noah Centineo, Black Adam) is the other. Both land in a court-mandated recovery program. Their lives diverge and collide, for better and for worse.
Ohio built this system for a reason. The state certifies specialized drug dockets that route people into structured treatment instead of a cell. In counties where the work dried up and the pills didn’t, those dockets carry a heavy load. Meeks doesn’t lecture you about any of it. He just puts you in the room.
Real People, Real Room, Same Bench
Meeks shot in an actual drug court. He then surrounded his stars with people from the program itself, some still working it, playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Poulter and Centineo deliver scripted monologues as testimonials while sitting beside people who have lived every word.
When I first heard that, I wondered whether it was in the best of taste.
Then I watched the scenes. They carry a raw electricity, and both actors are smart enough not to overplay them. A kind of symbiosis forms. Poulter and Centineo never become indistinguishable from the people beside them. They also never stick out.
Annette Deao is the clearest case. She plays a chemical dependency counselor, and she does that work for real. Every week she sits down with incarcerated men and women and offers them a shot at a different life. You can hear that history in the way she talks to Poulter’s character. She’s had this conversation before, with people who didn’t make it.
Poulter Keeps Taking the Harder Road
Poulter has spent years choosing roles that shove against his perceived type, and he does it again here. He disappears into Cody, playing the small evasions and the shame underneath them without ever asking you to feel sorry for him. It’s the guilt that gives the performance its shape. Cody is the one who introduced his brother to the drugs that took them both.
Centineo shares some of the film’s strongest scenes with him, working in a register his fans won’t recognize. Emily Meade (Thanks for Sharing) plays their sister, a woman who loves these men and can’t entirely trust them. They lied to her and stole from her when she was at her lowest. Meade lets you see her doing the math on that every time one of them walks in.
Elise Kibler (Furious) and Deao give Cody two different kinds of comfort. Kibler’s character carries her own damage. The actress uses it to build a specific obstacle between two people who might otherwise be good for each other. Meeks leaves room in the script for everyone to find their small piece of gold.
The Camera Waits, and So Does the Score
Stefan Weinberger shoots this with real care. He’s an AFI-trained cinematographer whose work has screened at Cannes and Camerimage, and he treats these Ohio interiors like places rather than symbols of decline. Juliana Barreto Barreto, who designed A Love Song and All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, dresses rooms that look like people actually live in them. Lizzie Donelan‘s costumes do the same job without being too on the nose.
The score is the piece I keep thinking about. Celia Hollander, who also scored Good One, writes music that refuses to swell when a lesser film would tell you to cry. It thickens instead at the forks in the road, in the moments when somebody has a choice and knows it. Sean Weiner produced and has an Emmy nomination as an editor. You can feel that cutting-room instinct in how long the film is willing to hold on a face.
No Mountaintop, No Victory Lap
Union County premiered at Sundance in January and Oscilloscope picked it up, which is about the most fitting home a film like this could find. It isn’t going to blow your doors off with a big scene of reconciliation. Nobody hikes to the top of anything to declare victory over their troubles.
It doesn’t need to. Recovery, as this film understands it, is mostly showing up to a room full of people who know exactly what you’ve done. Then asking for one more week. Union County has spirit, sad eyes, and a soul.
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