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March 15, 2022 – The film’s eponymous protagonist, Leslie (Andrea Riseborough), became a household name in her small Texas town when she won the lottery. That fame quickly turned to notoriety when she spent much of that cash to fuel her alcohol problem. The film takes place in the years that follow, after she left her teenage son and started living on the streets. We begin with an emotionally fraught reunion with her now-adult son (Owen Teague), which ends when he discovers she has been drinking again. Over the course of her journey that follows, a local motel owner named Sweeney (Marc Maron) takes her in and nurses her back to health.
It’s based on the true story of the writer’s mother, and his camera tracks her with a delicate intimacy and intense subjectivity. That said, it’s hard to sympathize with her. Riseborough’s performance is incredibly strong, but for the entire first two thirds of the movie, her character does nothing but manipulate and take from the people who try to help her. Relatives Dutch (Stephen Root) and Nancy (Allison Janney) are positioned as villains after they shut her out, but it’s perhaps too easy to see it from their side. Their villainy is only firmly established later in the film, when they continue to publicly trash Leslie despite her sobriety. In this characterization, Root and Janney are turned into caricatures of Texan hillbillies; Janney sports a bizarre (presumably) fake tan that left her eyes untouched and pale. After all the terrible things we’ve seen Leslie do, it’s hard to find her likable even when she does redeem herself.
