A sobering documentary that follows three kids in a rural American town, as they struggle with family life and just simply surviving. It’s a brutal but necessary film about how sometimes pulling yourself up by your bootstraps is an impossibility. Despair and dwindling possibilities drive the narrative of this film, as these kids slowly become disenchanted and are forced to grow up quickly. The filmmakers don’t try to explain away their subjects’ situation by zooming out and approaching it as a socio-economic piece, and that makes it a much more powerful story. As the film winds down, you are hoping that some kind of miracle will happen and these kids will be pulled from this existence, but that just doesn’t happen in real life.