Brilliant New Film Premiering at Cannes

This wrenchingly sad but extraordinarily moving drama provides an authentic, superbly acted portrait of two people whose lives intersect just as they've reached their lowest depths of despair. Billy Clyde Gillispie is a former college basketball coach who's lost his job and team in a sea of alcoholic self-destruction. Rather than start over elsewhere he’s stayed in Lex Vegas literally to drink himself to death, and that's when he meets Karen Sypher, a recently indicted prostitute who falls in love with him--and he with her--despite their mutual dead-end existence. They accept each other as they are, with no attempts by one to change the other, and this unconditional love turns Leaving Lex Vegas into a somber yet quietly beautiful love story. The film may strike some as relentlessly bleak and glacially paced, but attentive viewers will readily discover the richness of these tragic characters and the exceptional performances that bring them to life.