A heartbreaking tale of how a drug addict impacts the lives of those around him, No Future recently world premiered at the Tribeca Festival.

Directed by Andrew Irvine and Mark Smoot, with a script by Smoot, it begins at a 12-step program, where Will (Charlie Heaton) shares his excitement about a new relationship. Yet beneath his hopefulness is a profound self-doubt that underscores the film’s aim to be “for and about those of us who have ever felt lost, forgotten, and left behind in a world absent of forgiveness and grace,” according to a directors’ statement.

The minimal story line follows Will as he struggles with sobriety, an achievement his estranged friend Chris (Jefferson White) can barely imagine for himself. When Chris visits Will after a long absence, Will declines to resume the friendship to protect his own recovery. The two young men were not just friends at one time but musicians in a band as well. Returning home, Chris is met by his mother’s accusations that he is high and her doubts that he will ever get clean. The next day, Claire (Catherine Keener) finds her son dead.

After the funeral, she looks to Will for comfort in what will become a secret affair fueled by a powerful brew of mutual guilt and remorse, anger, and grief. Complicating the Oedipal relationship are age-appropriate supporters, such as Will’s girlfriend, Becca (Rosa Salazar), and his father, Philip (Jackie Earle Haley), who, as a bereaved widower, is sympathetic to Claire when she loses her son.

There is blame all around. Claire assumes she enabled her son with empty threats that she wouldn’t take him back if he didn’t turn his life around. Philip believes it wasn’t just cancer that took his wife years ago but the stress over Will’s heroin addiction. He also informs Claire that her son would still be alive had Will not gotten him into drugs. Did Chris visit Will that last night hoping to score? It’s also evident that Will is not completely out of the woods when it comes to staying clean.

Heaton, best known for his role in Stranger Things, is also an established rock drummer, and does a fine job as Will. In a brave, noteworthy performance, Keener, deliberately plain and weathered as the tormented mother, adds another color to her palette of characters. And Haley, wholly playing against type as an attractive older gentleman, is unlike the unsavory characters he’s known for, such as horror icon Freddy Krueger in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Jomo Fray’s crisp cinematography and a mournful ambient score by Jon Natchez augment the tone of this penetrating drama that wears its emotions on its sleeve to highlight the damaging effects of addiction.