![\"Will](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/FT2OCAFQ6VAXTGUNDHOXHVJBE4.jpg\")
Will Poulter makes a major splash in the new Sundance film. Darren Gerrish\/Darren Gerrish\/WireImage for Netflix <\/p>\nThe Sundance Film Festival can be counted on for small-scale, low-key dramas set in rural enclaves full of barren woods, open fields, train crossings, messy working-class dwellings, and men and women coping with everyday hardships. Union County fits that template to a tee, blending fiction and non-fiction to tell the story of a young man striving to get a grip on his addiction\u2014and life\u2014in the heartland of America\u2019s opioid epidemic. <\/p>\n
In myriad ways, Adam Meeks\u2019 directorial debut is cut from a familiar cloth, right down to its mournful score and bittersweet atmosphere. Yet it also follows festival tradition by featuring a stellar breakthrough performance from a well-known actor\u2014in this case, Will Poulter\u2019s sterling turn as a junkie caught in a prison of his own making.<\/p>\n
Union County (premiering at Sundance on January 25) features Ohio\u2019s Adult Recovery Court, which assists addicts through a combination of drug tests, journal entries, and appearances before a judge to whom they report on their day-to-day progress (or lack thereof). <\/p>\n
Meeks\u2019 cast is populated with many real-life participants in this program, and their frank testimonials\u2014both in court and at the Addicts Anonymous meetings they attend\u2014contribute to the film\u2019s realism. Be it a man talking about finding strength from dedicating himself to his kids, or a woman confessing that she previously used narcotics to quell the troublesome emotions she couldn\u2019t manage, these survivors lend the material an authenticity that helps offset its more clich\u00e9d construction.<\/p>\n
Will Poulter makes a major splash in the new Sundance film. Darren Gerrish\/Darren Gerrish\/WireImage for Netflix <\/p>\n
Tasked with blending in alongside these non-professionals is Poulter as Cody, who arrives at Adult Recovery Court after a stint in prison. The rules for staying in the program are simple, but the dull, hard look in Cody\u2019s eyes indicates that he\u2019s hardly someone who\u2019s comfortable sticking to the straight and narrow. <\/p>\n
In a striped button-down and jeans, his bangs covering his forehead and his shoulders slumped so heavily that it\u2019s easy to visualize the invisible monkey on his back, Cody is a quiet and reticent newbie. Still, he perks up at the sight of Jack (To All the Boys I\u2019ve Loved Before\u2019s Noah Centineo), whose curly hair, bushy beard, camouflage baseball hat, and hurried body language immediately mark him as a source of potential trouble.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, Jack is Cody\u2019s foster brother and happy to see him after a lengthy time apart, and Centineo plays him as the type of lovably energetic kid whose vibrancy, sadly, is intimately related to his lack of inhibition. Jack has been in the program for months but is struggling to stay clean, and he gets Cody a job at a factory cutting wood planks. He also helps him reintegrate into their hometown, namely by taking him to a bonfire get-together in the middle of the forest. It\u2019s there that Cody meets Anna (Elise Kibler), a friendly local whose kindness is epitomized by her generously lighting a cigarette before giving it to him. <\/p>\n
When Jack fails an alcohol test and is booted from his recovery house residence, Cody\u2014who\u2019s been sleeping in his car, complete with hanging his washed clothes on outdoor clotheslines and brushing his teeth with a jug of water\u2014takes his room and discovers that Anna, fortuitously, works across the street at the women\u2019s shelter.<\/p>\n
![\"Will](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/5TNS7ZYTOZAY3P5CA3E4XKY7M4.jpeg\")
Will Poulter had a memorable storyline (with Lionel Boyce) on FX\u2019s \u201cThe Bear.\u201d Chuck Hodes\/FX <\/p>\n
Since his big-screen debut 19 years ago in Son of Rambow, Poulter, 32, has exhibited considerable range in a diverse array of projects that include Meet the Millers, Midsommar<\/a>, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3<\/a>, The Bear<\/a> (which earned him an Emmy nomination), and last year\u2019s Death of a Unicorn<\/a>, which he hilariously stole out from under Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. <\/p>\n Whereas he went over-the-top in that supernatural comedy, he tamps down any hint of charisma in Union County, embodying Cody as someone whose years-long battle with substance abuse has transformed him into a shell of himself. There\u2019s no showiness to the English actor\u2019s work here, just a marrow-deep woundedness that\u2019s colored with brief, piercing flashes of the healthier soul buried beneath an avalanche of need, regret, fury, self-loathing, and despair.<\/p>\n Poulter is working in well-worn territory in Union County, but his refusal to court manipulative waterworks is admirable. As Cody grapples with a catastrophic relapse and its fallout, the headliner\u2019s evocation of his protagonist\u2019s misery feels realistically muted, just as the plot\u2019s crises and recoveries resonate as genuine precisely because they\u2019re posited as regular potholes along this bumpy road. <\/p>\n To wit: When Cody\u2019s sister Katrina (Emily Meade) and her young daughter awaken to find him sleeping on their couch, his face badly bruised and his body battered, her silently furious reaction\u2014and the unpleasant incident that follows\u2014is staged with a flatness that speaks to its routineness in a family contending with crippling addiction.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Poulter is so good in Union County that he props up what amounts to a modest slice-of-life feature about the all-too-common opioid nightmares faced by millions of Americans and their families, friends, and loved ones. A shot of a bird flying out a broken window, or a car driving down an empty pastoral road, would be at home in any number of Sundance dramas from the past three decades, including last year\u2019s Omaha<\/a>, with which Meeks\u2019 film shares both a formal reserve and a story rooted in reality. <\/p>\n Like that festival standout, it also features a quietly affecting lead performance that deepens and becomes more empathetic as the character\u2019s circumstances grow more dire. In this instance, Cody ultimately must confront tragedy head-on and, with it, his willingness to keep battling his demons, and Poulter\u2019s understated tack goes a long way toward selling the action\u2019s concluding moments.<\/p>\n There are no grand gestures, bold confrontations, or uplifting platitudes in Union County. Rather, Meeks\u2019 film ends by recognizing that persevering through tough times is made easier with the help of others; that healing is a never-ending process; and that optimism is a commodity worth holding onto, no matter how difficult doing so may be. <\/p>\n It\u2019s a portrait of tentative hope that sneaks up on you, and serves as confirmation that Poulter, regardless of his already impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9, is an artist destined for even bigger and brighter things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sundance Film Festival can be counted on for small-scale, low-key dramas set in rural enclaves full of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206,98265],"class_list":["post-430068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-sundance-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430068","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}