Down to the Bone

“Proud to be an American” reads a faded poster leaning against the wall of a house whose paint is peeling. At the supermarket checkout, customers haggle over expired coupons. Economic pressure also shapes the life of the cashier Irene (Vera Farmiga), who lives with her husband and two young sons in the bleak hinterlands of New York. There is hardly enough money for overdue repairs, let alone to finance Irene’s secret cocaine addiction. To get her life under control, she decides to check into a rehab clinic—and she begins an affair with the ex-junkie Bob. On a whim, she gets a piercing and buys two snakes for the children. In her impressive feature film debut, Debra Granik paints an empathetic, unsentimental, and non-moralizing portrait of a working-class woman in her daily struggle for survival, caught between despair, a lack of prospects, and a spirit of resistance.