The Outrun review – Saoirse Ronan is remarkable in a sensitive recovery drama

Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

To tell an addiction story is to traffic in cliche. It’s “always a story that has already been told”, writes Leslie Jamison in her addiction memoir The Recovering, one that comes down “to the same demolished and reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.” Recovery relies on its own well-worn platitudes – rock bottom, one day at a time, “I’m X, and I’m an alcoholic.”

The Outrun, German director Nora Fingscheidt’s mesmeric adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir, accepts such trite foundations as a point. Rona, played by a never-better Saoirse Ronan, has a familiar pattern of despair and renewal – broken relationships, destructive blackouts and blistering hangovers. Derailed by alcohol at age 30, she returns to Orkney, an archipelago of about 70 islands in the northest north of Scotland where she grew up, to find herself in sobriety. She is not the first to start this journey, and she won’t be the last.

That Fingscheidt, working from a script co-written with Liptrot, renders this unglamorous process so beautifully, so specifically, and with such curiosity as to how a person learns to reconcile their past with their future, is a marvel to behold; The Outrun is the rare two-hour movie that made me forget to check the time. That it does so while avoiding the many cliches of the cinematic memoir adaptation – films which contort life’s sprawl into a clear arc of definitive scenes – is its own achievement, a testament to the source material and Ronan’s tremendous performance.

And one drawing on every cinematic tool to approximate the experience of two lives: drunk and sober, city and country. The poles are evident from the jump, as footage of the seals from Orkney’s coast – the selkies of folklore, according to Rona in voiceover that settles into the story – blends with her memories of clubbing in London. The first hour skitters through Rona’s psychological fragmentation, flipping liberally between the past and present (conveniently delineated by Rona’s hair, which she has a penchant for dying bright colors).

There’s the routine circle of life on the Orkney farm run by her father (Stephen Dillane), an Englishman plagued by bouts of manic depression since Rona’s birth; glimpses of her childhood reveal events that drove her soft-spoken mother (Saskia Reeves) to the mainland’s town, and to God. A job tracking the rare corncrake introduces her to new islanders and triggers memories of her biology master’s in London, of nights juiced with ecstasy, risk and the touch of her lost lover (I May Destroy You’s Paapa Essiedu). Of grief. A black eye, then a rehab program.

It’s an incredibly effective portrait of a reeling mind, the visual language of intrusive thoughts and rabbit holes. Flashbacks accumulate like the bottles on Rona’s floor. There’s a familiar dread to her descent, as she confuses the repetitive loop of benders with freedom, extremity with living, and lashes out at anyone who tries to ground her. Sobriety would be the worst crime of all: boring. Flingscheidt stages Rona’s first few months in Orkney – gray, windswept, isolated – in great contrast to the vivid nightlife of London, memories of which are increasingly blotted, piecemeal and truncated by shame.

And yet, as her story unravels, Orkney opens up; Rona moves even farther north, to the remote island of Papa Westray (population 70 or so), to weather the storm alone (but with wifi, and welcoming townspeople). The way Rona’s life is lightly yet still definitively shaped by the internet – tracking flights overhead and boats at sea, bombarded with her father’s mental illness via phone, telling her London friend on FaceTime that she’s better than she’s been in a long time – add to a convincing portrait of a real recovery.

Not all of the choices work – I found an additional layer of animation more alienating than illuminative of Rona’s psyche, and the final swell a bit too grandiose – but the overall effect is startlingly visceral. Credit, too, to the remarkable sound design, which cuts between Rona’s headphones and Orkney’s pounding surf; electronic music and nature are wondrous intoxicants when you submit to them, Orkney and Hackney not so far apart.

Ronan bridges the two seamlessly. She’s at once titanic and quiet, and utterly convincing even in the very difficult art of acting drunk. (Rona’s a believable mean one.) Recovery is a slog, and Ronan shows every note of it. Thankfully, The Outrun does not disavow the person she was before. The portrayal of her partying days doesn’t fall fully into the trope of smudged eyeliner and debauchery; the wonder that led her to dance open-armed in a night club crowd is the same that pulls her north, an instinct corrupted by alcohol but not inextricable from it. How do you hold on to the person who sought truth, connection, awe? How do you change? It’s cliche and truth: there’s no one answer, and I won’t forget watching Rona fumble toward it.

The Outrun is showing at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year