Here is the story. Penny (Leo) is a long time drug addict with proven bad taste in men. She loves her two children, Eli (Eisenberg) and his much younger half sister (who has clear emotional stunting), but she is no mother to them. She is more like an unreliable aunt. Eli is a talented pianist with a chance at a scholarship and a way out of the dead end life his mother leads, but he needs to make sure Penny can take care of herself and her remaining child. So he cajoles her into going into rehab—only she doesn’t qualify. In order to get in she needs to be actively using, no matter that she hasn’t been sober for any length of time her entire adult life. So Penny takes Eli to her local dealer, Sprinkles (Morgan). He doesn’t have anything, so they take off on a modestly successful and modestly doomed adventure to score from another dealer. We laugh, we cry, we hope that no one gets hurt, and we really get a sense that while Eli is flawed, he is lucky to be as together as he is, because Penny is really a mess.
Fortunately, there are no bed people in this story—while drug dealers and heroin addicts are probably not on your list of enduring friends, these are not evil people, and in the end Eli gets his shot at a scholarship and his mother seems to gradually wake up to the idea that Eli needs to move on. The cautionary tale about parental lack of responsibility and self-centeredness are a little over the top, but I do think that the tradition of putting your children’s interests at the forefront, doing things for their good, is a bit lost right now, and this movie reminds us of why that is important.
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