The beautiful, sometimes glamorous and often goofy Jennifer Lawrence is none of those things here. Here she's playing a veteran severely hurt by an IED in Afghanistan suffering a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). She is sent back home to New Orleans, and we watch her slowly try to relearn all of the basics: walking steadily, brushing her teeth, driving a car, etc. Her ultimate goal is to get herself redeployed with the Army Corps of Engineers. But as we see when anything goes a bit sideways (as real life is guaranteed to do), she has severe panic attacks (the ones in which you're convinced you'll die), including the time the old truck she's driving goes out on her. She meets a garage mechanic, played brilliantly by Brian Tyree Henry, who soon befriends her. And coincidentally, he shares her condition of PTSD and feelings of "survivor's guilt," having lost a leg in a car accident that killed family members. The best part of the movie is observing how this friendship grows. He's not only the sort of friend that will use his last cash to buy you a sno-cone, but will also risk it all by telling you that you're totally full of crap when you need to hear that. But there seem to be some key things missing from this movie. The women who wrote and directed it are all first-timers in filmmaking, and as decently competent as they prove to be, they have left out characters' backgrounds (like the character of JLaw's mother; what's her story?) and deeper insights into all their mental health. I give my rating of the movie one additional star for its routinely fine performances, so a 7/10.
