Strong Talent Elevates the Despair Porn of American Rust

Prestige television flogs another round of working-class misery.

American Rust. Showtime. Sunday, September 12, 10 p.m.

There's every reason why you might find American Rust irksome. It's about the 12,000th America-is-poor-and-dying tale going back to at least to The Grapes of Wrath. It's got all the usual suspects, from fentanyl to union-busters to vulturous corporate carpet-baggers to a drab and dying little factory town that everybody with a brain or a cute butt wants to get out of. All the marriages are broken; all the men are either rednecks toting hunting rifles or doddering old wrecks awaiting their mandatory strokes. There are moments—especially when the gruff sheriff is saving the sweet leading lady's mortgage from a mustache-twirling banker—that the show's artistic antecedents seem to be mainly dinner-theater melodrama.  In short, you've seen American Rust so many times you can recite most of the lines before they're spoken.

And yet… and yet… there's just too much talent stacked up in the cast of American Rust to turn away from it. Jeff Daniels as a morally exhausted police chief, Maura Tierney (The Affair) as an overwhelmed single mom, and Bill Camp (the basement chess wizard of The Queen's Gambit) as a dying and debilitated dad, are all too powerful to be contained by the clichés of their roles. All the characters in American Rust may be burnouts, but the cast and the show it populates is definitely not. Even in its slowest going, American Rust is hard to turn away from.

American Rust is set in the Monangahela Valley, a post-industrial urban graveyard in western Pennsylvania. About the only going economic concern in the fictional town of Buell is a sweatshop sewing factory that specializes in wedding dresses—which arthritic seamstress Grace Poe (Tierney) is naturally trying to unionize with little success. Even less is she able to motivate her son Billy (Alex Neustaedter, The Colony), a one-time high-school football star now given mostly to drinking beer and parking-lot fisticuffs.

Grace technically still has a husband, Virgil (Mark Pellegrino, Supernatural), the sort of guy who brags to his wife about the new sexual proficiencies he's acquired up from his young trophy girlfriend. But Grace isn't having any of it. ("I don't care if you can make me come a river of gold coins with a card trick.") She's more taken with the tentative advances of the laconic Del Harris (Daniels), slowly knitting himself back together after an ugly combat service in Iraq, even uglier police experience in Pittsburgh, and the prescription-medicine monkey on his back they led to.

The other family in this triumvirate of gloomy dysfunction is the Englishes. Widowed dad—there are hints of a wife's suicide some years back—Henry (Camp) is bedridden, and his adult kids Isaac (David Alvarez) and Lee (Julia Mayorga) have fled to greener pastures. In the case of Isaac, however, he didn't leave before becoming involved in an ominous encounter with an ex-cop whose battered corpse is later found in an abandoned factory.

Also part of the confrontation with the cop is Billy Poe, who, unlike Isaac, left some evidence of his presence at the crime scene. When police chief Harris discovers it, he finds himself in the position of mounting a murder investigation against his new girlfriend's son. Though it scarcely seems possible, the sad, busted lives of Buell's cast-aside characters are about to get even worse.

As battered as everybody is, though, the cast keeps them all alive. Tierney's essential sweetness in the face of utter exhaustion and Pellegrino's slimy charm are both alluring. More complex are Daniels' contradictory loyalties. After a long stretch as a bad cop earlier in his life, he wants desperately to be a good one. But how long can you protect your friends and their loved ones from the consequences of their own bad decisions? "We're in this together," Tierney assures Daniels at one point. Unfortunately, that's the problem.