‘Train Dreams’ Captures the Poetry of a Vanished America

The old world is gone, croaks a folksy narrator (Will Patton). “But you can still feel the echo of it.” A reverie of a drama, Train Dreams uses the modest life of a Pacific Northwest logger in the early 20^th century to convey the vastness of the world. It’s a slender film adapted from Denis Johnson’s slender novella, both of which contain a poetic enormity that belie their slim frames.

Train Dreams ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Clint Bentley
Written by: Clint Bentley, Greg Kwedar
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones, Clifton Collins Jr., Kerry Condon, William H. Macy
Running time: 102 mins

Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier, whose 80 years on earth are frontloaded with the awe and wonder of post-frontier living in and around the woods of Idaho. His childhood memories are fertile: boots nailed into an enveloping tree trunk, a giant river fish longer than its angler’s height, a two-headed calf in a quiet stable, a dying man nestled in a forest’s enormous root system.

But he’s also surrounded by bloody paroxysms — what the narrator calls “the casualty of violence” — like a Chinese immigrant thrown from a gorge bridge that he just helped to build, or a Bible-spouting logger shot in the back because he killed a man in Mexico for being black. His vocation as a sawyer comes with the danger of being rolled by a felled spruce large enough to wipe out a trio of horses. Or a falling branch big enough to scramble your brains. A tree is your friend, we’re told, unless you cut into it. Then it’s war.

Life can be nasty, brutish, and short, he learns quickly, after dropping out of school in his early teens and learning his trade. So the shy man keeps his head down and his mouth shut until his future wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) introduces herself after a church service. Soon their courtship leads to a rugged domestic bliss, where they stand on a newly bought parcel of land and plan out the contours of their imagined home with white stones in the grass.

And after their house comes a newborn baby girl, followed by even more expectations of building a future — one that requires him to join itinerant workers by traveling to places as far flung as Spokane to eke out a living. And every time he eventually returns to their Idaho home with a wadded-up roll of bills, his daughter looks like a different person.

The pervasive logging industry feels eternal and sturdy, although as time passes modernization creeps in with chainsaws and steam-powered bulldozers. There should be enough trees to last 1000 years, one of his colleagues muses — as long as a forest fire doesn’t wipe out all that you hold precious.

Train Dreams is a memory play, a movie of feelings and yearnings and mystery and awe, which leans into the notion of a lost time that filmmaker Clint Bentley evokes with a deft richness. He peppers his film with familiar faces: like William H. Macy as Arn Peeples, an old coot who shows up to do the “occasional and specific” work of detonating explosives; Clifton Collins, Jr. as a gentle Native American shopkeeper; and Kerry Condon as tough-as-leather Claire Thompson, a recent hire from the newly formed U.S. Forest Service who spends most of her time in a tower overlooking the woods. There’s a solitude among them all, Claire recognizes. “We’re just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.”

The haunting film requires subtle acting from a quietly powerful Edgerton, whose thick beard feels like its own character. His role is reactive and passive, which means this movie, like the novel before it, is not plot driven, but about mood and atmosphere, regrets and nostalgia. He embodies the spectator that we all become when the passage of time inevitably speeds up and makes life seem like it’s leaving us all behind. “You better hold onto something!” he’s told in a throwaway line during a ride in a biplane. And the declaration, boldfaced in its on-the-nose thematic summary, still rings true.

Train Dreams is showing in select theaters from November 7, 2025, and will be streaming on Netflix from November 21.