A black and cursed cloud, a vector of misfortune, follows Idaho day laborer Robert Grainier in director Clint Bentley’s elegantly crafted and ruminating Denis Johnson adaptation, “Train Dreams.” Beginning with a POV shot of a cut tree dropping dead to the ground, the camera fixed to where the fir was felled, this 20th-century portrait of the Pacific Northwest weaves much pain and suffering in the life of Grainier, played with a hardened soul by a bearded Joel Edgerton.
Robert goes from day laborer to Spokane railroad logger, perennially tested by a nature that seems to have more control over human destiny than people themselves do. Co-written by Bentley with Greg Kwedar (the primary creative team behind “Sing Sing”), “Train Dreams” thrives on its philosophical inquiries into the earthly randomness of events that make up a life. The effect — amplified by skillful craftsmanship and a fondness for detail in even the most out-of-focus corners of a shot — leaves you winded.
“Train Dreams” works from Johnson’s 116-page novella, which discursively moves through time where Bentley’s film, other than prophetic visions of a fiery future, moves in a straighter line. The culmination is a biography of Robert’s adult life, starting in the summer of 1917 Idaho and ending in Washington in 1968, the year of Apollo 8 going around the Moon and back. Robert’s logging crew is made up of gruff itinerants who also harbor the stereotypical racism of rural working-class Americans amid the turn-of-the-century immigration wave. An incident involving a Chinese worker, in which Robert is implicated, will haunt him for the rest of his days on Earth, even in supernatural form.
Robert’s life is altered by the arrival of Gladys (Felicity Jones) into it. The two fall hard in love, “Train Dreams” floating through their first few years together including the birth of their daughter, Kate. Though in a film where hallucinatory visions of wildfires attack Robert’s dreams, another tragedy is never not around the corner. The superstitious Arn Peeples (a hoarsely tragicomic William H. Macy) also portends doom in a movie where branches and brush are often falling down on people suddenly, killing or leaving them in a daze that will turn into eventual death.
“The world doesn’t stop needing spruce,” one fellow worker tells Robert after three men are killed on the job. Arn, meanwhile, is prone to grasping existential conversations round the campfire, where Robert waxes about “the newness of the experience.” Indeed, “Train Dreams” is a movie that wants to put the audience directly into the newness (and sometimes sameness) of its protagonist’s experiences, all but outfitting the camera into first-person mode. When Gladys strokes Robert’s beard or runs her fingers down his back, you can almost feel it.
Bentley and cinematographer Adolpho Veloso also plunge audiences into the tactile particulars and handcraft of logging, Robert sawing away with numb determination while he’s forced once again to be far away from his wife and child. Robert is a man with Job levels of cosmic bad luck, and the episodic unveiling of woes may test some viewers — but trust me, they are testing Robert much more. Edgerton, the Australian actor most celebrated for his performance as the white plaintiff in an interracial marriage case in “Loving,” keeps the emotions close to his chest until moments where he finally breaks open. Like a scene where he weeps after shooting down a buck, his life’s almost perverse adjacency to death becoming too much to bear at the sight of another fallen creature.
Bentley demonstrated a talent for immersion with his 2021 feature “Jockey,” whose star Clifton Collins Jr. briefly factors into “Train Dreams” as a thirsty panhandle traveler. That story of a retiring horse rider coming back to the ring for one last championship integrated a local vérité realism into its American Southwest tapestry. You can also see that same realism on display in “Sing Sing,” where co-writers and producers Bentley and Kwedar cast an ensemble of actual formerly incarcerated men into the correctional facility drama, which acquires a documentary-like power. “Train Dreams” comes with that same imprimatur of realness, like the Native tradesman (Johnny Arnoux) whose largesse picks up Robert at one of his lowest moments.
“Train Dreams,” overall, is a lonely movie, with Edgerton in every scene, the most intimate experiences of his later life often residing in dreams — a few characters come in and go like figments of Robert’s imagination, something he is often questioning himself. Kerry Condon plays a forester named Claire with whom Robert has a platonic connection, who becomes a kind of mirror for which to Robert to finally pour out his pent-up grief after an earlier grand-scale tragedy. His years worth of grief are like a clogged gutter that desperately need emptying. Speaking of that, Bentley and team vividly construct a wildfire set piece that feels eerily realistic and threatening right now of all times.
Some of the film’s introduction of midcentury technology (motors replacing steam engines, concrete and steel bridges in place of wood ones) is less smoothly rendered, but that only lends to the feeling of surreality that encircles “Train Dreams.” In moments, it feels like the movie itself is fever-dreaming, haunted by a piano, string, and woodwind score by Bryce Dessner, who’s one half of the band The National and emerging as one of the great (and instantly recognizable) film composers.
The movie’s dreamy rhythms don’t always add up to much in the way of plot, but that’s rarely an interest for Bentley and Kwedar, who here are more invested in conjuring the sensations of subjectivity. And how impressive that Aussie star Edgerton brings a real sense of all-Americanness to this story, making you wonder what he would’ve done in the more European-inflected vision of America “The Brutalist” had scheduling conflicts not forced him to drop out. (He was meant originally to play Adrien Brody’s role.) The presence of Felicity Jones, lovely here as an almost gossamer presence in Robert’s life, in the cast removes another few degrees of separation from that 2024 film.
With an economy of story elements and set design — where most of the movie takes place in nature’s open expanses — Bentley has crafted a plaintive and affecting film about how every moment holds value. But at the same turn, those moments are always on the verge of evaporating or going down in flames.
Grade: B+
“Train Dreams” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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