Katie has lived her whole life in the town alongside her broken-spirited mother as they make ends meet between them renting a shack from a local man, who seems to be willing to take payment however he can get it. Katie is 17 and working hard in a diner to earn money to keep her and her mother afloat, but it's not enough.
It's clear that her mother is abusing the good-natured Katie on all sorts of levels, in order to fuel her drinking lifestyle and entertaining men when she feels like it. Katie is strangely green in amongst all this, not the hardened, life-battered soul that we'd expect to see. She's pragmatic and knows how to earn money, doing sexual favours for people she can generally trust not to abuse her.
She has a few 'regulars' including Bear (played by James Belushi) who she can rely on to treat her well and provide a reasonable flow of income. Bear acts more like a father to her in many ways, which is a bit of an odd meander from the path. Anyway, along comes Bruno, played by Christopher Abbott of 'Girls' fame, fresh from prison, who is quiet but demonstrates caring towards Katie, which she warms to and is keen to establish him as her boyfriend. Her less-than-wholesome activities come out and Bruno is not best-pleased, so she promises to stop. In amongst all this, her mother has spent the rent on booze and the landlord is pressing the pair of them to settle up or else!
Olivia Cooke plays the sweet, almost naive Katie brilliantly well. The viewer gets onside with her, warms to her and sympathises with her - regardless of what she's doing to make money. She dreams of heading for San Francisco to train to be a hairdresser and is saving money for that too, justifying her means to herself as a dream for the future. She does want to get away from this small town but it gets complicated with Bruno's arrival and more so when some local yobs start to abuse her and she's wrongly accused of theft at work.
The drama rolls out with peaks and troughs, slow patches and more gripping phases, but through all this is (poor little) Katie in the middle, trying really hard to make something of herself. Trying to look after her mum, to save for a better future, to be kind-hearted (which she is) to those around her - and to some degree keep her head down in lieu of what's to come. Should she settle for what she has, work hard and expect little - or is it alright for her to have dreams, she wonders.
It's a film of hope through her eyes, of sadness in parts, of abuse and the human spirit rising up against the odds. It's a bit of a one-person show as Cooke is in pretty much every scene but the cast around her play their parts convincingly too. The audience can imagine what it must be like in one of these small outback towns in many places in the world for people trying to work out their place in society and their forward path.
It's a nice little drama with messages aplenty about all sorts of social dilemmas, as folk tackle life's difficulties. It's been captured here through the eyes of our leading girl who executes it very well indeed. Olivia Cooke has gone on the bigger things now, but I'd like to think that she looks back at this with a smile.
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