Review: Vanessa Kirby has no limits in hard-charging, kinetic ‘Night Always Comes'

San Francisco Chronicle​

5 days ago

'Night Always Comes' isn't an especially ambitious movie, but it's simple where it needs to be simple, and it's complex when complexity is called for.
Its simplicity has to do with its story and the emotions driving it. The movie quickly sets up a situation that's a matter of life and death. A woman needs to raise $25,000 in the course of a single night. If she doesn't, there's a real possibility that she and her family will end up homeless and on the street.
What would you do to avoid that fate? What would anybody do? Within minutes, the terms of 'Night Always Comes' are clear — we have a desperate heroine fighting for her life, who will do absolutely anything to keep from losing her home.
Vanessa Kirby plays Lynette, a woman living in Portland and working two jobs — a full-time one at a baking factory, and a part-time one in a nightclub. But despite her efforts, she is falling behind, and homelessness — for herself, her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her older brother — is as ever-present as the ground is to a tightrope walker. Just one misstep, and it's over.
The movie takes place during an acute economic crisis, though the specific terms of the problem are familiar enough in our current state of affairs. Wages are staying the same, while housing has become increasingly expensive. As the movie starts, Lynette has already struck a deal with a bank and the house's owner for her to buy the house she's living in. All she needs is $25,000, which she has. . . until she doesn't. And then the frantic, focused quest begins.
Kirby has a nice combination of qualities that suit her to this role. She is inherently sympathetic and clearly intelligent and rational, and yet something about her nature makes you believe that she has no limits. Thus to find her in situations where she must inevitably be beyond frantic is to anticipate a series of escalating extremes.
There are two ways to raise $25,000 over the course of a single night. One way to do it is to call someone who has that kind of money lying around and ask them to lend it to you. That's the easy way, which isn't available to Lynette. The other way, the rough way, is to plunge into the dark underworld and start improvising.
Based on the almost eponymous novel ('The Night Always Comes') by Willy Vlautin, the movie is about a woman capable of this kind of shady improvisation because of a past life on the fringes.
The movie devises lots of fraught, intense moments, but what's even more impressive about the screenplay is the way it seems to understand the psychology of the people that Lynette must deal with once she descends into the lower depths. Everyone she meets has an uncanny capacity to justify their most selfish behavior with deflections and evasions. It starts with her mother, played to the hilt by a maddening Jennifer Jason Leigh, and includes supposed friends. And what's telling is that each time Lynette encounters this wall of flimsy self-justification, she doesn't seem surprised. It's as if she's not just encountering individuals, but a malignant personality type.