When a filmmaker tells a story based on real events, especially ones that are inspiring or heroic, there’s always a risk of hagiography. “Clean Hands” is a movie where the storytellers either take a lot of license with an actual person’s life to add drama, or don’t seem aware just how unflattering their subject’s behavior actually is. Written, produced and directed by Jake Allyn (“Ride”), the film chronicles the relationship between real-life Hagerstown, MD narcotics officer Kevin Simmers (Zach Braff) and his efforts to rescue his daughter Brooke (Esther McGregor) from the grip of drug abuse. But while the “happening right under his nose” details lend a heartbreaking edge to a sadly familiar story, the script’s argument against criminalizing addiction reconciles uneasily with its portrayal of Simmers’ determination to save Brooke by any means necessary.
Simmers is a hero cop, looked up to by his colleagues and liked better than one might expect by the local townspeople, given his by-the-book approach. Though he maintains a close relationship with 19-year-old Brooke, he’s blindsided when he learns that she’s addicted to Percocet and has been consorting with abusive dealer Brick (Kraig Dane). After unsuccessfully trying to enroll her in a private rehab facility, Simmers learns that she’s moved on to heroin; he takes a tough-love approach to let her get arrested, hoping to scare her straight. But when even that fails, he becomes determined to cut off her supply at the source, pursuing local addicts in the hopes of apprehending anyone who might deal her drugs.
Despite the support of his religious wife Dana (Abigail Spencer) and colleagues on the police force, including an ambitious deputy (Lucas Till) eager to succeed him as the precinct’s role model, Simmers’ efforts to help get Brooke clean fail over and over again. As he faces the prospect of losing her to addiction, he begins to conceive an alternative path for struggling drug abusers, even while witnessing members of the Hagerstown community — including some of his fellow officers — exploiting addicts instead of helping them.
Given the infomercial pasted at the top of the closing credits for Brooke’s House, the rehab facility Simmers created in response to his daughter’s addiction, it feels safe to assume that the former police officer fully endorsed this portrait of him and his family’s struggles. Yet the typical disclaimer absolving the filmmakers of responsibility for dramatizing these real people’s lives is oddly posted at the beginning of the closing credits rather than at the very end, suggesting that some of the narrative leaps taken here by the filmmakers are bigger than usual. To that end, one can understand why Allyn wouldn’t want to risk misrepresenting Hagerstown law enforcement. But should audiences accept at face value every action taken by Simmers in his crusade to save his daughter?
By all accounts, he was a dedicated cop with honed instincts as an investigator, and a loving father to Brooke — so much so that, in the film, Dana accuses the two of them of being addicted to each other. But the character’s compassion towards perpetrators and his cool detachment under pressure seem only to apply when he doesn’t have an active stake in a crime. When he does, he seems willing to abuse his power and take any measures that he thinks will result in whatever he’s already decided the outcome should be — whether that’s lying to a healthcare provider to get his daughter treatment, or arresting an individual he deems complicit in Brooke’s condition.
As the film tells it, Simmers eventually learns that waging war against dealers and community enablers makes less of an impact on people who are addicted than providing them consistent, patient, loving support. But the character is so relentless for so long with his methods that it’s hard not to pin a portion of the blame for Brooke’s addiction on him.
Again, that seems distantly like the point (or at least one point) of “Clean Hands.” But Allyn is entirely too interested in Simmers’ police work, meaning high-pitched chases and strong-arm interrogations, to strike the right balance between his day job and his earnest efforts to help his daughter. As a viewer, it’s possible to forgive a character who’s so determined to protect his daughter that he takes overbearing or inappropriate measures, but when the film wants the crime stuff to be tense and exciting — amplified with music by instrumental rock act Those Who Ride With Giants — it undercuts the humanity of what that character is facing.
Simmers marks a departure from the kinds of roles for which Braff is best known, and the actor commits to the character’s tenacity and determination in a way that suggests he’s either prioritizing authenticity regardless of how the character is perceived, or he misunderstands how sympathetic Allyn’s version of Simmers can be. The problem is the contrast between his well-meaning actions and their impact on others: Brooke faces beatings in jail because her father antagonizes the guards and other inmates, God-fearing Dana flinches every time he drops an f-bomb or angrily dresses down a rehab administrator, and until the very last scene in the film, he ignores or dismisses the addiction, poverty or desperation of anyone he encounters who’s struggling.
McGregor offers a welcome counterbalance as Brooke, whose general disposition emanates from her relationship with her father, even as it’s hobbled by troubles the script pinpoints with delicacy. Though the film doesn’t quite know what to do with Dana as Simmers bulldozes his way to a cure for Brooke, Spencer similarly offers grace — or at least a less rigid form of support — that hints at how his initial way of helping may not be the most effective one.
To whatever extent this story is told accurately, Simmers was of course doing the best that he could to reckon with a challenge he’d dealt with in the line of duty, but never with a person so close to him — and years of repetition reinforced a one-size-fits-all reaction to an affliction that must be addressed individually. But the film builds to the founding of Brooke’s House and its immediate, overwhelming success, indicating that all Simmers needed to do was change his tactics, instead of the more meaningful, moving change in his perception of addiction as something to be mechanically repaired. A handful of appealing performances aside, “Clean Hands” ignores too many messy realities in favor of quick solutions; the stuff that gives a true story like this power is the hard work and struggle that happens between an epiphany about oneself and the reality of implementing its lessons in the world.