Cook County

D: David Pomes; with Anson Mount, Xander Berkeley, Ryan Donowho, Polly Cole

“Everybody’s talkin’ about how they want to take the edge off,” drawls the grimy, paranoid, East Texas meth-master, Bump. “Fuck that.” Bump is nothing but edge, and Anson Mount’s performance here is a hair-trigger work of tweaky outlaw panache, as unnerving as a meth-mouth reaper’s grin and as honest (and heartbreaking) as addiction-as-lifestyle. With his 5-year-old daughter, Deandra (Fitzsimmons), in danger of being sucked body and soul into his blinkered anti-life, phantom DEA agents lurking in the bushes, and his ne’er-do-well brother, Sonny (Berkeley), and his not-so-dodgy scheming, Cook County‘s emotional, human core falls upon Bump’s nephew, Abe (Donowho, in a performance that packs a simmering, sorrowful punch). Director and UT alum Pomes has crafted a darkly beautiful Southern Gothic about the frailty of the human heart and, too, its muscular powers of redemption. You wouldn’t want to live in hardscrabble Cook County, but someone has to, and as it turns out, they’re just like us, dancing shoeless on the amphetamined razor’s edge.

Saturday, March 15, 4pm, Alamo South Lamar

This article appears in March 14 • 2008.

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