Cherry True Story: How Much of the Movie Is Real

Warning: SPOILERS for Cherry.

Cherry‘s true story is complicated, as it takes into account real-life events, but follows a fictional character. The Tom Holland movie is based on Nico Walker’s novel of the same name, which weaves Walker’s own real-life experiences with that of the character Cherry.

The Cherry movie follows Holland’s unnamed protagonist, simply referred to as “Cherry” in the movie’s credits. It tracks him over the years from a college dropout, to decorated army medic, to notorious serial bank robber, and all the characters he meets along the way. His college sweetheart Emily (Ciara Bravo) is the only thing anchoring him to reality. But as he suffers through serious drug addiction and PTSD, he threatens to lose her and everything else he holds dear in his life.

The basic story of the Russo Brothers movie follows the events of Walker’s life fairly closely. It’s the smaller, more intimate details of Cherry that deviated from Walker’s life. But the story’s core message serves the same purpose as Walker’s book does, as it shines a light on the opioid crisis and unnecessary stigma on mental illness in veterans.

Cherry’s Depiction of Iraq and PTSD

In Cherry, Holland’s protagonist joins the army as a response to a breakup with Emily, who he falls in love with the first time they meet. Shortly after they begin dating, she announces that she intends to move to Montreal to continue her studies, which leaves Cherry heartbroken. At that point, his only answer is to the army as a medic. The movie shows that his experience is brutal, with the desert being harsh and unforgiving. The things he sees as a medic are burned into his brain forever, including watching his best friend die. It’s no surprise that once he returns home, he suffers from severe PTSD. As Cherry says in the movie, he constantly dreams of violence at night. He internalizes the stress from the experience and is constantly sick upon returning home. Movies often romanticize or gloss over a soldier’s experience in war, but that isn’t the case with Cherry.

While certain details were likely changed for Cherry, Walker’s brutal experience with Iraq was not. As Walker told The Guardian, he wrote the book because he wanted to show people just how bad the war in Iraq was. Walker felt his superiors took an excessively aggressive approach that caused more harm than good. After returning home, a psychiatrist eventually diagnosed Walker with one of the worst cases of PTSD he had ever seen. While Cherry spent more time in the protagonist’s post-Iraq years than in the war itself, the movie showed his experience through a gritty lens. When it came to Cherry’s struggle with PTSD, the movie left nothing to the imagination. The fact that Holland, an actor so closely associated with the sweet and naïve character of Spider-Man, was cast in the role made the character’s journey all the more jarring.

Cherry’s Drug Addiction

In Cherry, Holland’s character dabbles with drugs for years. He remains clean when he’s serving in Iraq, but sadly becomes a full-fledged addict in the years after he returns home and begins suffering from PTSD. Emily becomes frustrated and exhausted supporting his destructive habit, so she eventually joins him in it. Their shared heroin addiction nearly kills her, prompting her mother to beg Cherry to walk away in order to give Emily a clean slate. Cherry is eventually thrown in jail and has no choice but to get sober. In Cherry‘s ending, he reunites with Emily once he is released on parole. While it’s never explicitly stated, she appears to be clean as well.

Walker did suffer from a heroin addiction himself. But the interviews he gave on his experience focus less on his drug addiction and more on his experience in Iraq and as a bank robber. When it comes to this aspect of the story, the biggest fiction and reality is the character of Emily. Through the good times and the bad, she was Cherry’s guiding light. He tried to score more drugs for her and, when he eventually became sober, Emily was clearly the thing that pulled him through. While it’s believed Emily may have been based on one of Walker’s previous relationships, he didn’t have a partner in the experience like his film counterpart did. But Emily was a wise addition to Cherry’s story. Walker’s experience was undoubtedly harrowing and bleak; tt’s an important and interesting story that deserved to be told on the big screen. But from that story-telling aspect, there needed to be one positive thing in Cherry’s life – that thing that kept him going and kept the audience rooting for him. That thing needed to be Emily; even through the lowest parts of his life, his love for Emily is really what kept him alive.

Cherry Becoming a Bank Robber

The saddest and most fascinating part of the Tom Holland movie is when Cherry turned to robbing banks. Cherry and Emily flew through their drug stash and didn’t have enough money to buy more. Cherry went on a bank-robbing spree and perfected the necessary strategy to get the job done, even down to the right way to address women at the bank. Walker robbed banks to support his drug habit in real life. This is the aspect of his story that caught the media’s attention and eventually made Walker something of a household name.

In 2006, Walker returned home as a decorated army veteran. PTSD hit him fast and hard, so he turned to heroin to cope, and as Rolling Stone reported, he began robbing Cleveland banks in December 2010 to fund his habit. Four months later, he was arrested; he had stolen nearly $40,000 in ten heists. Walker went on to tell the publication that his bank heists were never fueled by a personal agenda. It was more of a transactional process, as it was the only way he could get his hands on money to fuel his destructive addiction.

Cherry depicted Walker’s mindset well. In the movie, Cherry robs banks as a last resort. His addiction got him into some bad situations, from owing dangerous people money to influencing his wife to turn to drugs as well. He was able to fully detach himself from the experience until he saw a female banker tell cry in fear during his heist, which led to Cherry turning himself in. The bank heists were the climactic experience in both Cherry and Walker’s experiences. Cherry may have changed some details from Walker’s life, but the movie ultimately captured Walker’s tragedy and redemption well.

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