Once upon a time, in the land known as America in the Go-Go Eighties, there lived a man named Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon).  He worked for Nike as a talent scout, searching far and wide for talent to sign up to promote basketball shoes.  Though he toiled day and night, his efforts proved fruitless.  Then, in 1984, the answer to his prayers emerged.  A young collegiate basketball player named Michael Jordan had risen to national prominence by helping North Carolina win the NCAA championship with an amazing shot in the closing seconds.  He was subsequently drafted by the Chicago Bulls and tasked with not only leading them out of obscurity, but to NBA championship glory.  Even though he was only eighteen years old, this didn’t phase him in the least.  Everyone agreed it was only a matter of when he achieved greatness, not if.  No, the biggest question surrounding Jordan was which company he would choose for a highly-lucrative shoe marketing contract.

Like many movies about drug addiction that have come before, A Good Person asks for our sympathy.  To my surprise, it got it without a struggle.  It tells the story of Allison (Florence Pugh), a young woman who became addicted to prescription painkillers after a fatal traffic accident.  Physically, she seems fine.  Allison moves about normally when she chooses to and has no visible scars.  Mentally, she’s in an entirely different place.  She spends her days in her house with the curtains drawn, lounging around, conspiring ways to obtain a refill of her expired prescription.  Her mother Diane (Molly Shannon) pops over unannounced, throws open the curtains and shrilly demands that her daughter get her act together.  Nobody ever told Diane that the last thing a drug addict wants is a high-energy pep talk.

Once upon a time, in a quiet suburb in New Jersey, Burt (Paul Dano) and Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams) take their son Sammy to see his first movie.  He’s apprehensive about the experience, so they do their best to explain it to him.  For an engineer like Burt, movies are nothing more than a magic trick the   projector plays on your brain.  Mitzi, a classically trained pianist, says that movies are dreams that you remember.  Their views on movies, while worlds apart, are both correct.  Sammy didn’t realize it then, but he will spend the rest of his life reconciling the perspectives of his parents on his journey to becoming a Hollywood film director.