‘The Outrun’ Review: From Rock Bottom to Recovery

Saoirse Ronan has made it apparent that she is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Nominated for four Oscars before she was out of her mid-20s, the Irish actress is the sort of performer whose presence in a movie is sufficient reason to see it. She chooses her projects carefully, often movies about complex women, and throws her whole self into them, with unforgettable results.

But how she does what she does is harder to pin down. Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in “Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they’re all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.

I think Ronan’s great ability lies in giving us the sense that her characters’ minds are always working, something that can only really be communicated through the eyes and nearly imperceptible facial expressions, flashes of anger and happiness and passion and pain. (And a lot of impishness; cheeky Ronan is always a delight.)

One might reasonably have expected “The Outrun,” in which Ronan plays a recovering addict desperately hanging onto sobriety, to be a more conventionally brash or hyperbolic role than usual, the kind designed for awards attention. Woman out of control, woman on the road to healing — you know the type. But Ronan is no ordinary actress, and she makes “The Outrun,” which occasionally veers near overdone territory, into a thing of beauty and hard-won joy.

The director Nora Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay for “The Outrun” with Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. In the film, Liptrot has been transformed into Rona, a 29-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, has a black eye, having been nearly defeated by life. She’s from a tiny village in the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland. Rona went to London to earn a graduate degree in biology, where she met friends and a man (Paapa Essiedu) she loved. But a latent propensity for addiction turned into a full-blown alcoholic spiral, and she wrecked her life completely.