Cherry (2021)

The Russo brothers, fresh from the Marvel apparatus, purchased Nico Walker's semi-autobiographical novel and turned it into a two-hour study of a young man's descent from college dropout to army medic to heroin addict to bank robber. Tom Holland, cast against his friendly-neighborhood instincts, spends the runtime looking like a man who has been asked to sit through a very long funeral. The film has style to spare and almost nothing else. It is a cautionary tale that keeps checking its own reflection.

On the question of social consciousness, the film is largely inert. The supporting cast includes performers of color, and the Iraq sequences and the opioid milieu are populated by a cross-section of Americans, but the film never pauses to examine what any of that means. Race goes unremarked. Emily, played by Ciara Bravo, functions as a romantic anchor and a fellow traveler into addiction, which leaves the whole enterprise thoroughly male-centric. There is a faint gesture toward systemic failure in the way veterans are medicated and discarded, and in the broader architecture of the opioid crisis, but the camera would rather watch Cherry sweat through withdrawal than interrogate the machinery that put the pills in his hand. PTSD and addiction are treated with clinical seriousness, though the framing is therapeutic, not affirmative.

What remains is a stylized, self-consciously gritty march toward the inevitable. The film moralizes only faintly, and its sermons are delivered to an audience of one. It is the kind of picture that mistakes volume for depth. Two hours of a good actor suffering in close-up, and the credits roll. The classification is straightforward: a personal spiral wearing the costume of a social document, with no interest in the social part.

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