Jake Allyn's film tells the story of Kevin Simmers, a real-life narcotics officer whose professional and personal lives clash over his teenage daughter Brooke's heroin addiction. When a filmmaker tells a story based on real events, especially ones that are inspiring or heroic, there’s always a risk of hagiography. Written, produced and directed by Jake Allyn (“Ride”), the film chronicles the relationship between real-life Hagerstown, MD narcotics officer Kevin Simmers (Zach Braff) and his efforts to rescue his daughter Brooke (Esther McGregor) from the grip of drug abuse.
But while the “happening right under his nose” details lend a heartbreaking edge to a sadly familiar story, the script’s argument against criminalizing addiction reconciles uneasily with its portrayal of Simmers’ determination to save Brooke by any means necessary. Simmers is a hero cop, looked up to by his colleagues and liked better than one might expect by the local townspeople, given his by-the-book approach. Though he maintains a close relationship with 19-year-old Brooke, he’s blindsided when he learns that she’s addicted to Percocet and has been consorting with abusive dealer Brick (Kraig Dane).
After unsuccessfully trying to enroll her in a private rehab facility, Simmers learns that she’s moved on to heroin; he takes a tough-love approach to let her get arrested, hoping to scare her straight. But when even that fails, he becomes determined to cut off her supply at the source, pursuing local addicts in the hopes of apprehending anyone who might deal her drugs. Despite the support of his religious wife Dana (Abigail Spencer) and colleagues on the police force, including an ambitious deputy (Lucas Till) eager to succeed him as the precinct’s role model, Simmers’ efforts to help get Brooke clean fail over and over again.
As he faces the prospect of losing her to addiction, he begins to conceive an alternative path for struggling drug abusers, even while witnessing members of the Hagerstown community — including some of his fellow officers — exploiting addicts instead of helping them. Given the infomercial pasted at the top of the closing credits for Brooke’s House, the rehab facility Simmers created in response to his daughter’s addiction, it feels safe to assume that the former police officer fully endorsed this portrait of him and his family’s struggles. Yet the typical disclaimer absolving the filmmakers of responsibility for dramatizing these real people’s lives is oddly posted at the beginning of the closing credits rather than at the very end, suggesting that some of the narrative leaps taken here by the filmmakers are bigger than usual.
To that end, one can understand why Allyn wouldn’t want to risk misrepresenting Hagerstown law enforcement. But should audiences accept at face value every action taken by Simmers in his crusade to save his daughter? By all accounts, he was a dedicated cop with honed instincts as an investigator, and a loving father to Brooke — so much so that, in the film, Dana accuses the two of them of being addicted to each other.
But the character’s compassion towards perpetrators and his cool detachment under pressure seem only to apply when he doesn’t have an active stake in a crime. When he does, he seems willing to abuse his power and take any measures that he thinks will result in whatever he’s already decided the outcome should be — whether that’s lying to a healthcare provider to get his daughter treatment, or arresting an individual he deems complicit in Brooke’s condition. As the film tells it, Simmers eventually learns that waging war against dealers and community enablers makes less of an impact on people who are addicted than providing them consistent, patient, loving support.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
