Saoirse Ronan delivers outstanding work in the otherwise standard addiction drama The Outrun

Rona (Saoirse Ronan) lives a divided life. It’s not just that The Outrun’s protagonist's life is fragmented between before and after she went into rehab for alcoholism. She's constantly torn between wildly disparate elements in her life. Her parents, Annie (Saskia Reeves) and Andrew (Stephen Dillane), divorced when she was young. This not only split her life in two. It also forced Rona to travel constantly between her Scottish home of the Orkney Islands and her mom's new domicile in London. Then there’s her father’s struggles with bipolar disorder. Rona must constantly alternate between being a daughter to Andrew and someone helping him cope with his mental health struggles.

Then there’s the ways addiction bifurcates her life. Rona is deeply passionate about ecological preservation. There’s nothing more she loves than the natural world and protecting it. Simultaneously, she grapples with a disease compelling her to destroy her body. Her memories with friends are also scattered into an array of disparate ambiances. Sometimes she has wistful recollections of these souls. Other times she’s haunted by her alcohol dependency ruining their social excursions. No wonder writer/director Nora Fingscheidt (who penned this script with Amy Liptrot, author of The Outrun's source material) tells the story of Rona’s life in a non-linear fashion. Her existence is all over the place. A piece of filmmaking chronicling her should similarly eschew tidy chronology.

It's inspired casting having Saoirse Ronan play The Outrun's tormented lead. Ronan's film work has been defined by distinctly young characters. She got on everyone's radar playing the 13-year-old incarnation of Briony Tallis in Atonement, after all. From there, Ronan established incredible chops injecting idiosyncratic personalities into each of her youthful/teenage roles like the titular lead of Lady Bird, "Jo" March in Little Women, or Ellis in Brooklyn. Even her comedic See How They Run work intentionally contrasted her with an older craggily detective played by Sam Rockwell.

With The Outrun, Ronan inhabits a character (the struggling alcoholic) that’s common in cinema. That ubiquity, though, has cemented in people’s minds a distinct image of what a “movie alcoholic” looks like. They’re raggedy souls typically 40 or older. Think Bradley Cooper in A Star is Born, Robert Shaw in Jaws, or Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas. Addiction can manifest in anyone at any age in the real world. In movies, though, there’s a specific physical archetype for such characters. If your feature has a woman with a flask in her pocket, chances are Sydney Sweeney or Anya Taylor-Joy aren’t being eyeballed for the part.

That’s why it’s so bold to cast Ronan as Rona (and not just because of the similar names). It’s a bold against-type casting immediately upending conventional alcoholism depictions in film. Rona looks more like an authentic depiction of an alcoholic, rather than the narrow definition of such souls in most movies. Plus, it’s a character Ronan sinks her teeth into with aplomb. Across the feature’s various time periods, Ronan deftly threads a delicate needle rendering Rona as distinctly different yet also subtly consistent.

You can see fragments of Rona shining through in each period of her life even as traits like her physicality evolve in tandem with her dependency on alcohol. Most impressively, Ronan makes the big loud displays of addiction-fueled rage or frustration from Rona feel incredibly real. Other actors like Steve Carell lapse into unintentional comedy manifesting grand emotional displays. Ronan, meanwhile, lends such believable intensity to scenes like Rona drunkenly chewing out her mother’s religious dependency. In these moments, Rona feels truly and frighteningly unpredictable. You don’t need me to tell you Saoirse Ronan is one of our best living actors. You can watch her magnificent work in Lady Bird alone for proof of that. But if you crave a vivid reminder of that truth, The Outrun has you covered.

Save for Ronan’s outstanding performance, there’s little in The Outrun adding much to the cinematic canon of addiction dramas. The feature is partially held back by a somewhat inconsistent screenwriting approach. Fingscheidt and Liptrot wisely take a cue from past addiction dramas like Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot and execute this story non-linearly. That’s an always-inspired move to reflect the jagged existences of folks suffering from addiction. Interspersed in there, though, are various pieces of voice-over narration from Rona. These explain things like Scottish mythology or scientific jargon related to her disease.

These digressions (which feature cutaways like archival footage and even one animated segment) are too tidy for their own good. Having Rona in control as a narrator upends the free-flowing chaos exuded through the non-linear storytelling structure. These screenwriting details clash in a way that detracts from The Outrun rather than enhances it. Speaking of the non-linear structure, it's a shame Stephan Bechinger's editing doesn't find more ways to subtly intertwine Rona’s disparate epochs. One great cut sees Rona on a rural seashore collapsing to the ground while lugging some timber in the daytime. She then lands, hands-first, on the concrete streets of London at night. The latter backdrop was home to one of Rona's most traumatic experiences. Bechinger's editing her vividly communicates how reminders of the tortured past keep echoing into Rona's world.

Unfortunately, that great burst of editing reinforces how paint-by-numbers The Outrun otherwise is when cutting between distinct points of Rona’s life. For her part, Fingscheidt sometimes excitingly harkens back to the anarchic propulsive camerawork of her outstanding 2020 feature System Crasher. This is most apparently witnessed in a sequence where Rona, alone in a room facing the sea, acts like she’s piloting a boat on stormy waters. Here, Fingscheidt and cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer bob the camera back and forth as if choppy waters are sending it careening. It’s an inspired detail that immediately puts the viewer into Rona’s head space.

Much like Bechinger’s editing, though, the high points of Fingsheidt’s directing just reinforce the rest of the production’s rudimentary fashion. Rona’s life typically appears in a stiff, traditional fashion far too reliant on cramped framing. While you never know where Ronan’s performance will go next, Fingscheidt’s filmmaking is unfortunately far more predictable. The Outrun is a movie a bit at war with itself between its inspired lead turn and its more formulaic visual tendencies. That’s disappointing, but also a tad poetic. A movie about Rona is just as jaggedly divided as the woman herself.