Katie waitresses at a remote Arizona roadside diner and lives in a mobile home with her depressed mom, who spends the rent money on booze. Instead of being overwhelmed by these challenging circumstances, Katie has set her sights on moving to San Francisco to become a beautician. In order to realize this dream, she supplements her meager wages and tips by prostituting herself to passing truckers and local citizens - and keeps her savings from these encounters in a shoe-box under her bed.

Katie is cheerful and resilient to a degree which stretches credulity, but Olivia Cooke does extraordinary work to keep her believable and sympathetic. Meanwhile director Wayne Roberts extracts fine performances from the rest of his cast. Despite her engaging personality, Katie has made enemies as well as friends in town - and when she falls in love with a taciturn ex-jailbird mechanic and quits selling her body, they show their true colors. The script piles troubles onto Katie's shoulders as her altered lifestyle becomes the catalyst for serious trouble. The subsequent events are a tough watching experience - but the excellent acting, direction and cinematography make it well worthwhile.

One of only two characters in the film who treats Katie like a human being is the jovial trucker named "Bear." At one critical point in the film, Katie is describing how she wants to leave the bleak existence of her impoverished Arizona desert world to move to San Francisco and become a hair stylist. But Bear attempts to put Katie in her place by saying "we all got our place in the world." Bear's words are worth examining in the context of the world view presented in this film.

"Katie Says Goodbye" implies a bleak naturalism in which the angelic Katie is exploited by her mother and the men of the small Arizona town. Mr. Daniels was her teacher in the local school, yet he forces Katie to have sex with him. Dirk and Matty are regulars at the diner where Katie works, and they brutally rape Katie. Bruno is the ex-con, looking to start a new life after serving time for grand theft. He is incapable of recognizing Katie's soul or seeing how she has been abused. By the end, Bruno will be returning to prison. Katie's mother recognizes her own depravity in sponging off of her daughter, when she bluntly asserts that "I'm not a very good person."

The second person to provide support to Katie is Maybelle, her supervisor at work. But Maybelle is not a keen observer of the culture of the diner. Otherwise, she would have recognized long ago how Katie was being manhandled by the predators. She would have also known without asking that it was Chris, the daughter of the repellent Mr. Daniels, who stole the $40 from the cash register and not Katie.

So, the question that lingers is what degree of agency does Katie have in her life? Is Bear is correct in assuming that Katie needs to know her "place in the world" and never entertain the possibility of rising from her squalid existence? Or is there hope for Katie to realize her dream of becoming a stylist?

Through Katie's incandescent spirit and her resilience, the film offers a ray of hope for Katie to discover like-minded, decent people on a life's journey to happiness after her trial in hell.

Well. What a film and what a performance by Olivia Cooke. Such a gentle creature as portrayed and yet the world vomits on her eiderdown. I would cheerfully kill those people who were so cruel to her and yet her spirit seems to be unbroken, depending on how you interpret the ending.

Sensitively written and directed and good acting by all - it has to be if, as I did, you feel that you'd like to punch many of them in the face.

When you want to see a a sad but accurate view of the cruelty of mankind here's a brilliant example. In the same class as Monster with Theron and Ricci. Memorable