Joel Edgerton is going full mountain-man in Train Dreams, the film version of Denis Johnson's 2011 novella. If you know the book: yes, the one that first ran in The Paris Review back in 2002 and went on to be a Pulitzer finalist in 2012. Johnson famously wrote it after disappearing into the woods for a bit, but the story itself isn’t based on a real person. The movie leans into that mythic, American-lonely vibe in a big way.
The story the movie is telling
Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, a lumberjack and railroad hand working the Pacific Northwest around the turn of the century. He’s a quiet guy fighting to find his place in a world that’s modernizing right under his boots. He marries Gladys, the love of his life, and they have a daughter, Kate. Then a forest fire takes them both while he’s away on a job. What follows is a life of solitude that the film traces from his orphaned childhood in Idaho (he arrives in Washington as a kid) all the way to his deathbed.
The movie is intentionally stripped down: Grainier says little, the men around him are loud and crude, and he keeps drifting toward people who speak in wisdom more than noise. One of those drifters is Arn Peeples (William H. Macy), a big-hearted rambler who nudges Grainier toward a different way of looking at things. Will Patton narrates, which gives the whole thing a tactile, lived-in feel. And yeah — the film has the quiet confidence of something that could land on a lot of year-end lists. Edgerton’s work here is the kind people call Oscar-worthy without laughing.
How they cracked the adaptation
Director Clint Bentley and his creative partner Greg Kwedar approached this like a field study. Bentley told Tudum they holed up in a cabin near where they set Grainier’s home and spent time with local loggers while they wrote. The goal was to honor Johnson’s voice while still making a movie, not just a transcription. Bentley calls it a constant balancing act between being faithful and letting the film be its own thing.
'I wanted to be loyal to the spirit of the book Denis wrote, but also let the story become the movie it needed to be.'
Book-to-screen changes you’ll notice
- The novella spans decades, and the movie sticks with that sweep — from Grainier arriving in Washington as an Idaho orphan to the end of his life — but it narrows the emotional focus.
- Felicity Jones plays Gladys. The film digs into Grainier’s anxiety about leaving her and their child for days at a time to work.
- Kate is aged up to about two years old in the film (she’s roughly four months old in the book). When Gladys and Kate die in a forest fire while Grainier is away, the movie treats that loss as the defining event of his life, revisiting it through constant flashbacks and imagination.
- The 'wolf-girl' thread from the novella is gone. Instead, a flesh-and-blood child shows up at Grainier’s cabin, and he believes she might be Kate.
- Some of the book’s harsher side stories are toned down or cut: the dying tramp who admits to sexually assaulting his niece (leading to her death) is not in the movie.
- Kootenai Bob, Grainier’s Native neighbor who dies after getting drunk and being hit by trains in the book, doesn’t meet that fate here; the film instead gives us Ignatius Jack (Nathaniel Arcand), a storekeeper who becomes Grainier’s friend.
The cast makes it sing
Edgerton does the heavy lifting as a man who communicates more with his face than with his mouth, and he’s excellent. He also executive produced, and Bentley says he was a genuinely strong partner on set. In Edgerton’s words, sometimes the people worth listening to are the ones who only speak when it matters — which is basically his whole approach to Grainier.
Felicity Jones brings warmth and steadiness as Gladys. Bentley credits her with giving the film its heartbeat, and Jones leans into the character’s elemental side — someone completely at ease in nature. William H. Macy’s Arn Peeples breezes in, drops some perspective, and breezes out; Macy describes Arn as a poet-philosopher-sluggard with real-life mileage, and the performance fits that pitch.
Kerry Condon plays Claire Thompson, a Forest Service worker stationed alone in a fire tower after losing her husband. She understands solitude the way Grainier does, which makes their scenes together feel raw and, honestly, pretty painful in the best way. Nathaniel Arcand rounds things out as Ignatius Jack, the kind of steadfast friend Grainier doesn’t get many of.
Train Dreams is now streaming on Netflix.