Sunday Matinee: ADDicted [Film]

“Like most college kids, Drew’s life is chaotic. Demanding classes. Football. Finals. A bad break-up. An overbearing mother. But what helps keep him balanced is his Adderall, a prescription he’s been on since age 10 for ADD. But now he finds himself suspended from the football team for plagiarism. As his life starts to spiral out of control, he turns to his professor, but is it too late? What will it take for Drew to find peace with himself instead of a pill bottle?” – Vision Films

Director Dan Jenski had a clear and concise vision when he was developing ADDiction, that is something very obvious. He gave himself the task of dramatizing one of the most oddly common and wildly misrepresented struggles of modern day humanity. Within each and every one of us is a yearning to be both excellent and loved. Our internal drive to succeed, or at least get by, is rarely turned off for many of us, but some of us lack the physical make up to bring ourselves out of the everyday mundane sense of existence. This is when something like Adderall can be a literal wonder drug. While often times misdiagnosed, the threat of ADD is a real one. It does exist. And Jenski is the man who decided to show us what would happen if we took Adderall usage to an all time high, or low, depending on how you look at it.

And his end result was the masterfully done film that is ADDicted. It is an overall brilliant film about the struggles of an average upper-middle class college kid who enlists the help of an ambitious woman who obviously just doesn’t have all of her shit together. So when these two team up, it is quite bloody obvious that it isn’t going to go well. The internal and external tension of these two with their family and those around them is the sort of thing that makes for some of the most delightfully awkward cinema you will ever witness.

While I have already stated that Jenski has turned in a brilliant product of a film, so much credit has to be given to Kathreen Quinlan, Gil Bellows, Luke Guldan, and Lauren Sweetser who turned in some of the finest performances of their careers. ADDicted is a brilliantly written tale about a very real problem in our modern society that simply needed to be told. And we should all be so pleased that it was decided that this would be how it was told. If any real change is happen on our society when it comes to dealing with the mental and physical travesties of prescription medication, I truly believe that a dramatization such as this could truly be a step in the right direction.