Train Dreams

Train Dreams is a quietly devastating period drama directed by Clint Bentley, who adapted Denis Johnson's acclaimed 2011 novella with his longtime writing partner Greg Kwedar. Spanning roughly eight decades in the early twentieth-century American West, it is a profound meditation on love, grief, and the vanishing wilderness, lived out by an ordinary man far from the centers of history. Joel Edgerton anchors the film with one of the most restrained and affecting performances of his career.

Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an orphaned day laborer who builds railroads and fells timber across the forests of the Pacific Northwest around Bonners Ferry, Idaho. He finds unexpected happiness with his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their infant daughter, only for a catastrophic wildfire to shatter the life he has made. The rest of the film traces his solitary years in the woods as the country modernizes around a man who remains bound to the land and to his memories, with Kerry Condon and William H. Macy in support and Will Patton narrating in the cadence of Johnson's prose.

Premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival before its Netflix release, Train Dreams drew rapturous reviews as a gorgeous, elegiac portrait of American life, earning an exceptional 94% on Rotten Tomatoes. It became a major awards contender, collecting multiple Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was named one of the year's best films by the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. It is streaming on Netflix.