119 min | R | October 7, 2022 | Momentum Pictures
A West Texas woman wins the lottery, drinks the whole fortune away, and washes up broke in the town that watched her do it. Six years later she gets one more shot at not blowing it. Andrea Riseborough disappears into the wreckage so completely you forget there is an actor in the frame.
Leslie wins the lottery and drinks it all away. Six years later she is broke, alienated from her son, and unwelcome in the West Texas town that watched her squander a small fortune. The film opens after the money is already gone and refuses to romanticize the boom that preceded the wreckage. To Leslie is not a movie about addiction as spectacle. It is a movie about the daily arithmetic of a person who has burned every bridge and still has to find somewhere to sleep.
Andrea Riseborough plays Leslie as a woman who weaponizes charm because it is the only currency she has left. She smiles at people right before she steals from them. Riseborough lets the desperation leak through the bravado in small physical tells, a hand that shakes reaching for a drink, a laugh that lasts one beat too long. Marc Maron plays Sweeney, the motel manager who offers her work and refuses to flinch when she fails, and he grounds the film with a stillness that contrasts her chaos. Allison Janney plays Nancy with a hardness that reads as betrayal rather than cruelty, and Andre Royo gives Royal a wariness earned across years of being used.
Michael Morris directs his first feature with patience and a refusal to cut away from discomfort. Ryan Binaco’s screenplay walks the familiar beats of the redemption drama, but Morris slows them down and lets scenes sit in real time. The cinematography favors the bleached daylight of parking lots and the sodium glow of motel rooms, and the camera stays close enough to track every flicker across Riseborough’s face. The needle drops lean on country and classic rock without turning the soundtrack into commentary. The film trusts the performance to carry the emotional weight and gets out of its way.
This is a character study built on a single actor’s willingness to disappear into the worst version of a person. Binaco’s structure is conventional and the arc bends toward hope in ways you can see coming. None of that matters because Riseborough never lets Leslie become a lesson. She plays a woman, not a cautionary tale, and the difference is the whole movie. To Leslie earns its small grace by making you watch the cost of it first.