Train Dreams reviewed: horror and wonder among the redwoods

Back in 2000, when Uncut secured Denis Johnson’s first interview in 15 years to promote Alison Maclean’s adaptation of Jesus’ Son, we hailed him as “the world’s greatest living writer”. Johnson died in 2017, but if anything his reputation has only grown. His wild, imagistic prose seems designed for the screen, but since Maclean’s film there’s been only one attempt to bring his work to cinema – Claire Denis’ strangely underpowered version of Stars At Noon.

So the spectacularly successful Train Dreams feels a long time coming. It’s adapted from Johnson’s most perfectly realised short fiction, telling the intimately epic story of Robert Grainier, an orphan turned logger on the early trainlines of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century.

Grainier is no great hero: he witnesses horror and wonder among the redwoods as the frontier creeps west, suffers excruciating loss, is plagued by strange dreams and visions, and very nearly encounters the young Elvis Presley. Mostly, like Faulkner’s folk, he endures in his log cabin in the Moyea Valley, his own private Idaho.

Writer-director team Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar made their names with earnest, documentary-style productions, culminating in 2023’s garlanded Sing Sing, about a prison theatre project. Little in their earlier films prepares you for the visionary rapture of Train Dreams, which finally brings some of the Johnsonian frazzled dazzle to the screen.

The film has drawn comparisons to the transcendental pantheism of Terrence Malick, and there is indeed some of that awe at the primeval splendour of the American West. But as the film hopscotches through Grainier’s memories, skipping ahead to his wonder at the sight of satellite images of Earth in a TV shop window, it invites comparison to the glittering stream-of-consciousness of RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys.

Joel Edgerton has the kind of squinting, haggard, bearded face that could have emerged from a 19th-century daguerreotype. He might be any age from 25 to 65, and he excels as Grainier, battered, buoyed and bewildered by the currents of time. His performance is compelling, even when the voiceover veers perilously close to a kind of folksy transcendentalism – Thoreau meets Grizzly Adams.

There are wonderful performances throughout from luminaries such as William H Macy, John Diehl and Kerry Condon. But the real star may be Adolpho Veloso’s cinematography, crafting luminous sparks of memory floating in darkness like glowing embers from a campfire.