Joel Edgerton steps into the dust-covered boots of Robert Grainier, a quiet day-laborer haunted by loss and the slow erosion of the American West, in Train Dreams, the mesmerizing new indie adaptation of Denis Johnson’s Pulitzer-nominated novella that begins streaming this weekend on Hulu and select arthouse platforms.
Directed by Clint Bentley in his follow-up to the acclaimed Jockey, the film distills Johnson’s spare, poetic 2011 masterpiece into 98 taut minutes of silence, smoke, and sorrow. Set between 1910 and the late 1960s, Grainier’s life unspools like a half-remembered dream: he survives the catastrophic 1910 wildfires that devoured three million acres of Idaho forest, loses his wife and infant daughter to a freak blaze years later, and spends decades drifting between railroad camps, sawmills, and solitary cabins while the country he once knew is paved over by highways and progress.
Edgerton, sporting a weathered beard and eyes that carry the weight of unspoken grief, delivers what critics are already calling the performance of his career. Gone is the polished intensity of Warrior or the coiled menace of The Gift; here he is all restraint, speaking in monosyllables when he speaks at all, letting long, wind-whipped shots and the howl of freight trains do the talking. “I wanted Grainier to feel like a ghost haunting his own life,” Edgerton said in a rare interview at the film’s Telluride premiere. “He’s not broken by tragedy so much as hollowed out by it. The land changes, the trains stop coming, and he just… keeps going.”
Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar shot on 35 mm in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, capturing the same unforgiving beauty that swallowed whole towns a century ago. Cinematographer Adrien Brody—no relation to the actor—uses natural light almost exclusively, bathing Grainier’s solitary nights in lantern glow and the orange flicker of remembered fire. The sound design is equally merciless: the distant shriek of locomotives, the crack of pine snapping in flames, the eerie silence after a wolf pack passes through camp. There is no score for the first 40 minutes; when it finally arrives, courtesy of composer Daniel Hart, it’s a lone harmonica that sounds like it’s being played by the wind itself.
Supporting turns are sparse but searing. Lily Gladstone appears in heartbreaking flashbacks as Grainier’s wife Gladys, her laughter the only bright color in a film drenched in sepia and ash. Thomasin McKenzie plays the grown daughter of a fellow rail worker who briefly rekindles Grainier’s faith in human connection, while Sam Rockwell cameos as a drunken preacher who delivers a sermon on curses that feels ripped from a Cormac McCarthy fever dream.
What elevates Train Dreams beyond elegiac mood piece is its refusal to romanticize the past. Grainier isn’t a noble frontiersman; he’s a man who clears forests for pennies, watches Chinese laborers die building the very railroads he rides, and quietly absorbs the casual racism and violence of his era without comment. Bentley lets these moments sit uncomfortably, trusting the audience to feel the moral rot beneath the myth of rugged individualism.
Early reviews have been ecstatic. IndieWire called it “a small miracle of economy and emotional devastation,” while The Playlist declared Edgerton “gives the kind of performance that quietly redefines an actor’s range.” With awards season already whispering his name and a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score from the first 27 critics, Train Dreams is poised to become the rare literary adaptation that matches—and in some ways surpasses—its source.
In an era of bloated franchises and algorithmic content, Train Dreams is a defiant throwback: a film that trusts silence, trusts landscape, trusts an audience willing to sit with a man who has nothing left but memory and the long, lonely whistle of a train disappearing into the pines. Stream it this weekend. Just don’t expect to shake its spell anytime soon.