Joey Lauren Adams

Joey Lauren Adams’ acting has always been marked by casual elegance, coming from her instinctive ability to capture the insoluble complexity lurking in everyday people. In a breakthrough role as Chasing Amy’s Alyssa Jones, Adams took the emotional tempest within the pint-sized lesbian protagonist and outgunned the script’s inherent potential for melodrama with a performance that was as believable as it was stunning.

The same sort of effortless honesty marks Adams’ first turn as a writer/director in Come Early Morning. Shooting in her Arkansas hometown (literally in family homes and haunts), Adams paints a simple but layered character sketch of Lucy Fowler (Ashley Judd), a 30-ish woman whose steady career and resolute independence are uncomfortably mirrored by a steady flow of booze and one-night stands too rote to even be transactional. Ensconced in a dysfunctional family network she handles with both dutiful reverence and starkly sublimated rage, Lucy reaches to break through to her emotionally crippled father while struggling awkwardly to engage the possibility of love with the handsome new guy in town. Consciously shot simply and peppered with roots music, the film conveys an unmistakable sense of place—a small-town America that’s both dignified and bleak in its insularity and paths of habit.

“I really wanted to make a movie that was similar to my life experiences,” says Adams, who freely characterizes the film as “emotionally autobiographical.”

Given Adams’ commitment to the character, the connection she forged with Judd is palpable onscreen. “Working with her was one of the most amazing experiences of my life,” says Adams, “It must be like when a sculptor gets a piece of good clay and gets something going. I couldn’t believe how unbelievably talented she was.”

While making the film, Adams and Judd refused to let Lucy learn any particular lessons too quickly or completely. “It’s very small steps we take in growing,” says Adams, who admits that the hopeful cinematography of the film’s closing shot was meant to counterbalance the plainly stated realism of the plot’s refusal to offer any fully satisfying resolutions to Lucy’s struggles with the men in her life. There’s truth in the messiness and Come Early Morning is unflagging in its emotional naturalism.

For Adams, it’s an impressive start to a new phase in her career, and perhaps a harbinger of what’s to come. After almost five years of struggling to make Come Early Morning a reality, she is rightfully more than a bit enamored with the results: “I can’t tell you how empowering it felt to walk on the set and what once was a blank piece of paper was there come to life. It’s just such an amazing feeling.” Smacking of both personal catharsis and universal wisdom, Come Early Morning is a compelling new step for a long-regarded talent.