American Rust review: Sombre drama weighed down by gravity of its noble intentions

With a cast of outstanding actors and high-end production values, the comparison is a little unfair. But the timing couldn’t be worse.

With a prestigious cast including Jeff Daniels, Maura Tierney and Bill Camp, it wouldn’t be fair to call drama series American Rust the poor man’s Mare of Easttown.

Nor would its high-end production values and ritzy source material – an acclaimed and awarded novel by Philipp Meyer – lend itself to being thought of in such terms.

And yet, by virtue of its timing, this is exactly the comparison it invites.

This sombre, character-driven murder mystery centred on a compromised cop and set in an impoverished western Pennsylvania town is coming five months after the superb Mare of Easttown, which, if you’ve forgotten, was a character-driven murder mystery centred on a compromised cop and set in an impoverished western Pennsylvania town.

But where Mare of Easttown had a nimbler sense of itself and its world, allowing it to add many moments of levity and drollness to balance its grim subject and the many, many tragedies in its characters’ lives, American Rust does not.

Jeff Daniels as a compromised cop. Picture: Dennis Mong/Showtime

American Rust is weighed down by the gravity of the story it’s trying to tell. It feels every ounce of the social importance of telling this story about the American underclass and the communities left behind by neoliberalism.

It’s a well-made series on many levels, including the performances and the production design, with its well-worn, paint-chipped and red-brick environment, as if the cinematography was tinged with a patina of rust to really sell the idea that no one in town has bought anything new in 20 years.

As far as world-building goes, American Rust does a thorough job in really painting a bleak picture of a place with little hope – maybe too good a job because it’s not somewhere you want to be, although its complex characters do their best to convince you otherwise.

Which is to say, at least in the first few episodes made available for review, American Rust is dreadfully dull. It’s more concerned with the details of misery than it is with plot momentum, which would be fine if it wasn’t so dreary.

Maura Tierney is best known for her roles in Newsradio, ER and The Affair. Picture: Dennis Mong/Showtime

The fictional setting is Buell, a former steel mill town that is closer in geography and culture to West Virginia than Pittsburgh, sheriff Del Harris (Daniels) tells a city auctioneer in town to sell off seized homes.

The auction doesn’t go ahead after shotgun-brandishing townsfolk scare off any potential bidders – all perfectly legal of course, because it’s America.

Buell’s parochialism is draped in the shroud of the opioid epidemic, paralysed by the spectre of economic depression and laden with the deterministic sense that the town is on a death march to redundancy.

When a former police officer is found murdered in the abandoned mill, Del’s instinct is to protect Billy Poe (Alex Neustaedter), the son of his ex-girlfriend Grace (Tierney), whose jacket he finds at the scene.

American Rust is streaming now on Paramount+. Picture: Dennis Mong/Showtime

That illegal and highly unethical choice speaks to American Rust’s thematic focus on what is legal and what is right in a community where loyalty and connections are more important than anything else – especially when you have little else.

American Rust is a slow-moving series with no sense of urgency – even though there is a murder to solve and secrets to unravel – but it is burdened with purpose.

That purpose is to tell this humanist story about communities beset by economic and social ills largely outside of their control. But noble intentions and a mighty good cast aren’t always enough to make you stick around on the hope it gets more interesting.

American Rust starts streaming on Paramount+ today

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Originally published as American Rust review: Sombre drama weighed down by gravity of its noble intentions