After crafting the biggest movie of all time you could be forgiven for resting on your laurels for a while. Not so for Joe and Anthony Russo – directors of monster Marvel hits Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame – who dove headfirst into an epic of a different sort with the Tom Holland starring Cherry. A sprawling, multiple year spanning odyssey of one man’s journey through a seemingly normal adolescence in Cleveland through to a PTSD-inducing stint in the army and a subsequent life of crime and crippling addiction, Cherry may be framed as a dissection of the opioid addiction crisis rampant in America, but it is as much a love story between two people who are simultaneously so right and so wrong for each other. The leading duo of Tom Holland and Ciara Bravo are phenomenal, but the Russo’s throw every cinematic trick in the book at their first post-MCU outing, constantly threatening to derail the whole thing with a jarring and bizarre mixture of film techniques.
A drifter by nature Cherry (Holland) moves about his life in Cleveland without direction, passing through a string of dead-end jobs and finding himself infatuated with college classmate Emily (Bravo). A casual dabbling in drugs is just a taste of what is to come as Emily and Cherry’s relationship begins to turn serious and a fight one night prompts a drastic reaction from both parties, with Emily threatening to head to Canada and Cherry enlisting in the US army. Inexplicably drawn back to one another, the couple stick together throughout Cherry’s two-year stint in the army, dragged through the worst of the worst as a combat medic and suffering from severe PTSD on his return to the States. A prescription of OxyContin to treat his illness serves as the entry point for Cherry’s addiction, abusing the painkiller and hooking Emily before the couple turn to a life of heroin abuse. The junkie lifestyle proves unsustainable for the young lovers however and, desperate to pay off their debt to dealer Pills and Coke (Jack Reynor), Cherry turns to a life of crime to sustain them, robbing banks at gunpoint to feed the vicious cycle as his guilty conscious begins to creep up and eat away at him.
The relationship between Cherry and Emily is the centre of Cherry, the connective tissue that pulls you through the three distinct periods of this young man’s life. Those eras may fluctuate in quality and the style choices made by the Russos (we’ll get to those later) may draw your attention away at times but Holland and Bravo’s performances are simply phenomenal, fully investing you in this intense, toxic relationship between two people who could not be more wrong for each other but, like the drugs they inject by the boatload, can’t seem to kick. It’s easily Holland’s most ambitious performance to date, a far cry from the wholesome, boyish charm of Peter Parker and more akin to the darker side of his character in The Devil All the Time. Indeed it seems to have been a difficult role for the young actor – with multiple interviews covering the intense places he went to for the performance – but it pays off. The look of sheer terror in this young man’s eyes when his friend is blown apart in battle is harrowing to watch and the subsequent heart-shattering breakdown make you want to reach through the screen and give him a hug.
Spending the time to show a significant portion of Cherry’s military journey makes that eventual turn to drugs all the more debilitating for the audience. This kid has survived so much and come out on the other side but with a mental trauma that no one should ever experience, especially not a young 20-year-old in the prime of his life. His turn towards something that can numb his pain may be understandable to a degree but it is no less disheartening and watching the transformation of this wide-eyed, fresh-faced person with the world before him into a shell of a man, ravaged by drugs and mental disease is a hard thing to do, which is a testament to the strength of Holland’s performance. That performance doesn’t work nearly as well without the presence of Ciara Bravo’s Emily to balance it. In the younger years of their relationship, Emily makes some strong choices which ultimately impact the couple’s entire life, and Bravo wears the pain and stress of these decisions throughout the entire film; never forgiving herself for what she has caused Cherry and unable to bring herself to stop using the drugs that temporarily halt that pain. These two performances are so all encompassing that there is nary a supporting character in sight, with Jack Reynor’s clumsily named drug dealer and a handful of Cherry’s friends operating on the periphery, influencing the key couple’s relationship but never intruding on that bond. At the end of the day Cherry and Emily only have each other – and the Russo’s succeed in showing the strength of that love against all else.
Where they go wild however is in the construction of the film. Seemingly free from any shackles imposed on them during their Marvel days in keeping a distinct, grounded visual style across multiple films and franchises, the brothers throw every trick in the book at the screen to spice up a grounded drama that really requires no fancy trickery that takes away from the performances. That’s what these tricks ultimately do, distracting from Holland and Bravo constantly with awkward, gaudy colour grading during scenes of drug abuse; flooding the screen with an ugly grey sheen and popping colour in as a representation of the trip or turning the whole screen red during somewhat pretentious title card scenes, indicating new chapters in Cherry’s story. Awkward voiceover and fourth wall breaks from Holland dilute the potency of the performances in scenes that require no explanation of what is going (again a hallmark of The Devil All The Time) and perhaps the most jarring and unwarranted effect arrives during Cherry’s military experience: a complete aspect ratio change that reduces the widescreen format to a square box in the middle of the screen, a frankly bizarre choice that will have you checking your TV settings for an explanation. I questioned at times whether this over-stylisation of the film was an attempt at a Goodfellas-esque crime epic, but where that film glorified the violence and excess Cherry admonishes it, with all these awkwardly utilised techniques working against the very grounded story the Russo’s are trying to tell.
Cherry represents an awkward step away from the multi-billion dollar franchise that made the Russo brothers household names but a welcome willingness to keep working when they very well could have taken some much earned time off. While it may seem at times that the brothers are working against themselves, hampering the strength of their commentary on the opioid addiction crisis through over-the-top stylisation, the performances of Holland and Bravo and the central relationship between the pair win out, keeping you locked into a love story that is more interesting and emotionally engaging than the drug commentary. It isn’t the home run into prestige drama that many were expecting but it is an interesting change of pace for the Russo brothers, and an exciting prospect of what the future holds for these two incredibly talented filmmakers.
Cherry stars Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Forrest Goodluck, Jeff Wahlberg, Michael Rispoli & Jack Reynor – Streaming on Apple TV+ now.