You aren’t ‘Here’

In the often grisly “You Were Never Really Here,” the protagonist’s weapon of choice is a ball-peen hammer. In many ways, Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Jonathan Ames’ novel functions like that hammer, a blunt instrument used to righteous ends. The film tends to the lurid and horrifying, the brutal and harrowing, and yet Ramsay’s limber direction and another phenomenal leading performance by Joaquin Phoenix lend the material an aching sensitivity and an arrhythmic but persistent heartbeat.