A new trailer has arrived for Union County, a grounded addiction-recovery drama starring Will Poulter and Noah Centineo.
Written and directed by Adam Meeks, the film follows Cody and Jack Parsons, two brothers navigating a court-mandated drug rehabilitation program in a rural Ohio community hit hard by the opioid crisis. Poulter plays Cody, while Centineo plays Jack, and the trailer suggests a film less interested in big melodramatic breakdowns than in the slow, difficult work of staying alive, staying sober and trying again.
That quieter approach may be what makes Union County stand out. Addiction dramas can easily become misery machines, but this one appears focused on recovery as an ongoing, fragile process: meetings, routines, relapses, small victories and the human support systems that help people keep going when shame and exhaustion start to win.
The film also blends professional actors with real-life participants and staff from the local recovery court system. Annette Deao, a real addiction counselor, appears in the film as herself, giving the story an added layer of lived-in authenticity. That mix of fiction and documentary texture has been one of the most discussed elements of the film since its Sundance premiere.
Will Poulter looks especially strong here. After years of sharp supporting roles and bigger genre projects, Union County gives him a restrained lead performance built around silence, discomfort and emotional damage rather than spectacle. Cody is not presented as a movie-style “redemption arc” hero. He looks like a man trying to survive one day, one meeting and one choice at a time.
For fans of intimate indie dramas, Union County looks like a compassionate, human-scale film about addiction, family and the difficult architecture of recovery. It does not seem to promise easy healing. It promises something more honest: people doing the work, even when the work is slow, painful and invisible to almost everyone else.
Union County opens in select U.S. theaters on August 14, 2026.
