AllMovie

An unexpected death brings together a disjointed community of family, friends, and casual acquaintances in this independent drama from filmmaker Matt Porterfield. Putty Hill is a working-class neighborhood in Baltimore that has seen better days; the economic downturn has hit the town hard, and many of the area's young people seem to have little in the way of ambition or a future. Cory was a young man from Putty Hill who has died of a heroin overdose; while it seems that everyone knew him, no one knew him very well -- not even his family, who had fallen out of contact with him as his drug use increased. Despite that, Cory's family and circle of friends come together for his funeral, and in the day leading up to the memorial, people gather in the neighborhood hangouts to remember who they've lost and talk about their own lives and where they want to go. A semi-improvised project created when another film by Porterfield fell apart during pre-production, Putty Hill received its world premiere at the 2010 South by Southwest Film Festival.