Sundance review: Small-town despair is sharply drawn in 'The Evening Hour'

‘The Evening Hour’

★★★

Playing in the U.S. Dramatic competition of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 115 minutes.

Screens again: Thursday, Jan. 30, 10 p.m., Redstone 2 (Park City); Friday, Jan. 31, 5:30 p.m., The MARC (Park City); Saturday, Feb. 1, 3 p.m. Resort (Sundance).

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A sharply specific sense of place permeates director Braden King’s “The Evening Hour,” a solid tale of small-town suffering in coal country.

In a Kentucky town, Cole (Philip Ettinger) works as an assistant at a senior-living center and is studying to be a nurse. But where Cole makes his real money is a side hustle, buying excess painkillers from his elderly neighbors and selling them to addicts. Cole sets some rules, like never taking pills from the patients in the center, and staying away from the real action of the town’s ruthless drug lord, Everett (Mark Menchaca).

The equilibrium in Cole’s life, which includes a sexual relationship of sorts with the somewhat shady Charlotte (Stacy Martin), is disrupted by several things at once. His grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor), a snake-handling evangelical preacher, dies after a long illness. That brings Cole’s wayward mom, Ruby (Lili Taylor), back to town. Also back in town is Terry (Cosmo Jarvis), an old high-school friend of Cole’s, who has plans to sell hard drugs and horn in on Everett’s trade.

King (who was at Sundance in 2011 with “Here”) and first-time screenwriter Elizabeth Palmore, adapting Carter Sickels’ novel, land all the details of Cole’s Kentucky town, where the mining company looms over the double-wide trailers and the town bar is the extent of the social scene. The bar is also where Cole’s old crush, Lacy (Kerry Bishé), is working again, having recently dumped her husband. It’s a place where everyone wants to get away from, but few ever do.

The setting doesn’t make up for a familiar storyline, the one where a guy riding the edge between legal and illegal finds he can’t keep the balancing act going indefinitely. Ettinger is engaging, but can’t quite make the character unique.