Train Dreams

A standout critical and audience favorite at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, this lyrical adaptation of Denis Johnson’s acclaimed novella stars Joel Edgerton as a laborer whose life bears witness to several decades of profound change and social upheaval. Edgerton plays Robert Grainier, an orphan who spends most of his life amid the wild, ravishing scenery of the Pacific Northwest as a logger and railroad worker. Though he experiences his fair share of toil and hardship, Robert’s life is suffused with beauty and marked periods of ecstatic joy, including his courtship with spirited, beautiful Gladys (Felicity Jones). Deftly adapting Johnson’s episodic prose for the big screen, filmmaker Clint Bentley and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Greg Kwedar (both of Jockey and Sing Sing) have crafted a subtly profound epic from elements both intimate and momentous. Train Dreams is a lovely meditation on man’s connection to the natural world and a testament to the way that seemingly mundane incidents make up a life.

2025 Sundance Film Festival premiere.

IMDb Info