To Leslie.

Like most people, even like most film critics, I had never heard of To Leslie before the surprise nomination of Andrea Riseborough for Best Actress in this year’s Academy Awards in late January. The film had taken in just $27,000 at the U.S. box office and had just a handful of reviews on Rotten Tomatoes at the time; there are far more reviews now but they’re almost all new as critics have rushed to catch up. Despite the controversy over how Riseborough ended up getting the nomination, To Leslie is quite a good film, and deserves the much wider audience it’s received, with standout performances from Riseborough and from her co-star Marc Maron. (You can rent it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)

To Leslie is supposedly based on a true story, although the real person who inspired it has never been named that I can find. Leslie (Riseborough) is a single mom in west Texas who wins $190,000 in a local lottery, but who spends it all, mostly on alcohol, abandoning her 13-year-old son, losing her friends, and ending up homeless. The film jumps forward to the point where she’s been kicked out of the motel where she was living and has to call her son, James (Owen Teague). He lets her stay with him if she quits drinking, but that goes as you’d expect, and her life continues to spiral downward until she ends up at another motel run by Sweeney (Maron), where she gets a job cleaning rooms that also includes a place to stay. The majority of the film comes after that point and watches her struggle to stay sober, find some sort of purpose, and deal with the notoriety she’s acquired through her windfall and how publicly she squandered it.

There are, of course, a lot of addiction/redemption stories out there, and To Leslie is very much of that ilk, but it does several things to distinguish itself from its peers. One is that it doesn’t lionize the addict. Leslie’s kind of a terrible person. She’s not just a fuck-up, to use the technical term, but really does not seem to grasp the effects of her actions on other people at all, most notably how her choices in life have affected her son. She’s not the addict with a heart of gold for whom you just can’t help but root; I was rooting for Leslie because I didn’t want to see things continue to get worse for her, or to see her cause more misery for anyone around her. There’s no sense of “oh, if only she could get better, she’d be this wonderful mother/friend/person.”

To Leslie also doesn’t provide much in the way of magical solutions to addiction. Sweeney certainly helps her, but in a more practical sense, rather than, say, dispensing words of wisdom or some pop philosophy. Royal (Andre Royo) also lives and works at the motel, and he knows Leslie from childhood, so he’s seen her act and is very disinclined to help her, even trying to convince Sweeney not to give her the job or a room. Nance (Allison Janney), who we only know at the start as a former friend of Leslie’s, is openly antagonizing her in public. There’s no panacea here and no too-perfect friend or family member to offer a cure. Instead, Leslie pretty much has to do this on her own.

Riseborough is on camera for virtually the entire movie, giving this role a level of difficulty that few of her peers could match for this year. It is, truly, a tremendous performance, on par with Cate Blanchett’s in Tár, which I had as the best performance by an actress I’d seen so far in this cycle (even though, sentimentally, I’m pulling for Michelle Yeoh). She’s completely lost in the role, so it’s hard to even remember that she’s English, let alone that she’s not actually Leslie. It’s a fine line to walk to keep this character interesting without making her too pathetic or making her detestable, and Riseborough manages to stay on it. (She’s also great in the musical adaptation of Matilda, which came out last year on Netflix.) Maron is also excellent, giving Sweeney some nuance and complexity without making him too nice, or too sappy, or too much of anything. He’s a regular guy, and while his interest in helping Leslie isn’t that well explained by his back story – it’s just not that plausible – their interactions come across as very real. None of the supporting actors have that much to do, with Janney slightly wasted in her one-note role, while Stephen Root, who plays her partner Dutch, suffers from a lack of screen time.

As for the controversy over the nomination … I get why the Academy has those rules in place, but this is a good outcome for Riseborough, for the movie, and for the awards themselves. Maybe it’s a reminder to everyone involved that there are always great performances that get overlooked because the movies are too small or commercially unsuccessful. I’d probably still vote for Blanchett, but I wouldn’t argue with anyone who thinks Riseborough is better.