‘Train Dreams’ Review: A Folk Ballad of Denis Johnson’s Forgotten Men

Like a Bob Dylan folk ballad adapted for the screen, or one of the tragic stories Nick Cave threads through his darkest songs, Train Dreams is a saga centered on the life of a solitary man living through a world in transformation—a melancholic yet powerful journey into the lives the passage of time tends to forget. Based on Denis Johnson’s novella, the film carries the same blend of realism and frontier mysticism that defines many modern westerns, works set in those liminal spaces between what once was and whatever will someday come. It is an intimate tragedy and, at the same time, a quiet story of forgotten men who seem to merge—like the boots nailed to the trees in memory of those who die on the job—into the very universe that saw them born, struggle, and die.

Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) is just another man in this frontier story set in the Northwestern United States, in Idaho’s rugged Panhandle and the surrounding region. A taciturn loner, he works mostly as a logger, traveling to wherever labor is needed, joining other anonymous workers—immigrants, Native Americans, men from various states and backgrounds—who share a life of physical exhaustion, unstable pay, and long silences broken only occasionally by personal stories. Not everything is kind or fraternal—racism, violence, and survival instincts flare up more than once—but what gradually forms in Robert’s mind is something like a human map of the region.

Robert’s life takes a decisive turn when he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), a young woman he falls in love with. They move together to a small riverside plot, building a cabin with their own hands. For a time, he finds refuge and something close to happiness: long months spent working away from home, followed by stretches of domestic peace in a place that looks like a small paradise. They have a daughter, Kate, who grows up while the century moves forward, the war comes and goes, and work changes with the times. Then tragedy strikes, and everything shifts for Robert. The film, which until then had played like a folk-infused frontier portrait that someone like Kelly Reichardt or early Terrence Malick might have made, turns darker, denser, and more anguished, reflecting its protagonist’s increasing isolation.

Train Dreams draws a direct line to Denis Johnson’s recurring themes. Although much of it is set a century ago, like Jesus’ Son or Tree of Smoke, its protagonist is an ordinary man pushed by circumstances—and by his own desperate choices—to the margins of both the society around him and the history that society tells about itself. He is not exactly a forgotten hero, but a solitary laborer to whom nature has given much and taken just as freely.

As the narrative unfolds, the relationship between man and landscape becomes central. Robert makes his living cutting trees (in a sense, he could be a more accessible, narrative version of the protagonist of Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad) and sometimes works on railway construction, though he hates the atmosphere of that world. More than once, he and fellow laborers—such as William H. Macy, excellent as an explosives specialist with a story and an opinion about everything—talk openly about the damage their work inflicts on nature. The film never states it directly, but there is a painful irony in what ultimately happens to Robert: a tragic connection between the personal and the territorial, between industrial expansion and the land that both tolerates and perhaps rejects it.

The first half of the film is its finest—its most lyrical, romantic, and warmly human—offering a nearly gentle portrait of an ordinary life. Beyond the idyllic setting, Robert works hard, meets curious people, witnesses and endures all sorts of experiences—some amusing, others terrible—and seems to carve out a small corner of peace at home. Anyone who has read Johnson knows such serenity cannot last. After that turning point, Train Dreams doesn’t lose its calm or its melancholy, but it becomes heavier, a weight the director Clint Bentley occasionally balances with dreamlike sequences or visually intense, nightmarish imagery. Still, the dominant emotions are sadness, loneliness, and the sense that Robert, like so many others, is slowly being swallowed up by history, fading into a ghost of himself.

Even with those brief flirtations with dreamlike visual montage, the film—directed by the co-writer of Sing Sing and the equally melancholy Jockey—moves and resonates thanks to its portrait of immense solitude. Edgerton delivers a quietly powerful performance, speaking little, acting mostly with his face (and his beard). Bentley leans heavily on the voiceover narration by Will Patton (also the narrator of the Train Dreams audiobook and an actor who might well have played this role decades ago), which embraces its literary tone, alongside Adolpho Veloso’s Tarkovskian cinematography and the score by Bryce Dessner of The National. The Nick Cave song that closes the film (for reasons that are impossible to explain without spoilers, deeply affecting) lands like a punch to the chest.

Premiering at Sundance and nominated for multiple Gotham Awards, Train Dreams could easily become one of the year’s quiet “discoveries,” a film that slips unexpectedly into critics’ top ten lists or even the Oscars. Not that it is looking for that. Instead, it wants to tell a piece of American history without mythologizing its characters or inflating their deeds. Robert Grainier’s journey is modest, silent, and lived on the edges—painful to the marrow, but never pretending to be more extraordinary than any other life that crosses its path. Yet, without saying so, the film shows how even the smallest lives become part of something larger. “In the forest, even the smallest thing matters,” someone tells Robert. “Everything is connected, and you never know when one thing ends and another begins. A dead tree is as important as a living one. I suppose there’s something to be learned from that.”