Clint Bentley’s “Train Dreams” accomplishes what any literary adaptation should: a novelistic atmosphere. Perhaps it’s the nature of the lifetime spanning story or the language within the soothing, hearth-like narration by Will Patton, which draws verbatim from the novella by Denis Johnson. 

It feels novelistic in its aim to condense a man’s life into 100 minutes and in the way the edit flows from scene to scene, year to year, interaction to interaction. Glimpses of Robert, the logger turned lonely survivor at the center of the film, in his later years are spliced between scenes of him starting a life with his wife and child. 

“Train Dreams” feels novelistic in scope and artistry, brought to life beautifully by an astounding leading performance from Joel Edgerton. He brings such vulnerability welling up behind a tender wall of stoicism. 

Edgerton’s beard alone deserves praise; it felt like a character all on its own. I say that mostly jokingly, but I was shocked by how grounding it was to track Robert’s beard. Sometimes when the film is jumping in time, the best way to keep track of when and where Robert is, is to scan for how long or grey the hair is. It’s also just a great beard. I love a good beard in my movies. 

Ok, enough beard talk. It’s hard to describe the structure of “Train Dreams” because it really feels like a journey through the life of a transcendentalist in the Idaho panhandle. Being set in the mid-1900s, Robert goes through a bracing amount of tragedy. 

Each event, seemingly more heartbreaking than the last, builds to a climactic moment of clarity in which Robert remarks he can see every moment, every strife, in his life connect to bring him where he ends the film – at a moment of peace and satisfaction. 

Throughout his story, Robert encounters peculiar prospectors, harmonica-playing loggers, and bounty hunters. One of these character run-ins particularly moved me. 

William H. Macy, of “Shameless” fame, plays an elderly lumberjack named Arn Peebles. Arn is too old to actually participate in the sawing and chopping, so he mostly tends to the horses and sings to bother his compatriots. 

In one scene, Peebles explains to the young workers, all huddled around a fire at night, why they should revere the trees they fell. He mentions how old they are, how much more life they’ve seen than the young men, and how heavy on the spirit it should feel to bring one down. 

Every time a tree is cut down in the film, Bentley shoots it with such grandeur that it feels like a monumental loss, similar to when one of the people Robert interacts with dies or leaves him. Much like the barren land left behind by the lumber companies, Robert becomes a shell of a man by the end of the film. 

He is haunted by the specter of his wife, played by Felicity Jones, and hears his late daughter’s voice in the trees. Robert is a mid-century American just trying to plant his feet on the ground before his environment changes again. 

Throughout his life, he sees trains tear through the land he inhabits, roads replace the railroads he shed blood to build, and he watches humanity launch into space. All the while, he’s still hammering fresh shingles on his dilapidated cabin. 

Watching a film as human as “Train Dreams” with a massive crowd inside The Englert Theatre felt like the most heart-wrenching way to see it. I could hear the gasps, sniffles, and laughs from around the room during some of the most pivotal scenes, which heightened the experience. 

Then, as the credits faded, Patton and Cindy Lee Johnson spoke on stage about the legacy of the late Denis Johnson, a University of Iowa alumnus. Their conversation brought new light to the film as they both spoke so intimately about the experience of watching it. 

Bentley’s film felt like a special way to open the 2025 Refocus Film Festival. a weekend of programming about adaptation designed to incite enlightening conversation. The roving nature of the film may not be to everyone’s taste, but I found “Train Dreams” to be a harrowing yet ultimately life-affirming joy.