Can someone who did bad things still be a good person? Writer and director Zach Braff explores this question in a new film starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman.
Zach Braff is most famous for playing a likeable doctor in the TV sitcom Scrubs but he's also written and directed independent films like Garden State and Wish I Was Here.
In interviews, Braff comes across as decent and eager to please, which isn't always the best thing when you're making a gritty film like A Good Person.
It's the story of someone failing to face up to one of the worst things you'd have to face. Her name's Allison and she's just got engaged to Nathan, the nicest chap in the world. The best way I can describe Nathan is a Black Zach Braff.
But one day, as Allison is driving Nathan's sister and her husband home, she takes her eye off the road for one terrible second.
Her two passengers are killed, and Allison goes to pieces. The family blames her, she blames herself, she breaks up with Nathan, she turns to prescription drugs.
For a year, the only person Allison sees is her mother, who's at her wit's end, unable to help.
We intercut between Allison and other people affected by the events - the bewildered Nathan, and the daughter of the dead couple Ryan who is forced to live with her grandfather Daniel, Nathan's father.
Daniel's got enough problems of his own without taking on those of a troubled teenager.
He and his son Nathan don't get on anyway, and there's clearly a secret family history there as well.
When you consider that A Good Person is a film written and directed by a part-timer, there was every chance that it could end up as another ambitious failure, despite a heart in the right place.
That it's not is down to two extraordinary bits of luck for writer-director Zach Braff.
The first was the attachment of Florence Pugh to the project - currently one of the great guarantees in the film business. That's not entirely good luck, though - she was at the time Zach Braff's girlfriend.
The other bit of luck was less predictable. The great Morgan Freeman, who you'd think had long outgrown little indie films like this one, read the script, loved it and turned up on the set ready to work.
So the unlikely casting of Florence and Morgan turned out to be organic rather than contrived. And as usual, both deliver in spades.
I have to admit I was expecting the story to slip up more often than it did. For a start, you're going to need to buy Morgan Freeman as a model train geek. But Zach Braff is careful to give his leads something to get their teeth into.
Morgan plays Daniel far spikier than many of his recent, lovable grandpa roles. His scenes with young Celeste O'Connor as Ryan are funny without overdoing the sentiment.
Meanwhile Florence Pugh, as always, is wonderful, though occasionally not in the way you were expecting.
She plays an aspiring singer-songwriter, and to A Good Person's credit, she remains aspiring. This isn't one of those films where she ends up on top of the bill at Carnegie Hall or something.
But Allison does get to sing a couple of rather good songs inspired by her experiences.
And it turns out, these were both written by Florence Pugh, who sounds like equal parts Aimee Mann and Scarlett Johansson.
But of course, on top of that, she's also Florence Pugh, who needs no other comparison.
A Good Person takes risks, it delays allowing either of the characters to be actual good persons until the end, by which time we've forgiven them anyway.
Above all, it avoids the formulaic, follow-the-dots approach of so many audience-pleasers. It's that other, harder thing. It's a real movie.
