Edgerton delivers a profound performance in ‘Train Dreams’

Joel Edgerton in a scene from “Train Dreams” (Netflix)

There is nothing grand about Robert Grainier’s existence. The main character of “Train Dreams” is not a great thinker or athlete. He doesn’t know who his parents are or exactly how old he is. He isn’t chatty or passionate. He simply lives because life is there — what choice does he have?

Yet Clint Bentley’s adaptation of Denis Johnson’s novella gives this modest life a wide, soulful canvas. Grainier may be a logger and day laborer, but with a poetic narrator (Will Patton) and cinematographer (Adolpho Veloso) capturing the Idaho Panhandle at magic hour, “Train Dreams” renders his world quietly epic.

Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar reorder Johnson’s opening, delaying Grainier’s complicity in the killing of a Chinese laborer — a bold, unsettling introduction in the book. Here it arrives later, perhaps to soften contradiction. Instead, the film opens on railroad tracks cutting through a tunnel as Patton’s narrator speaks of “passageways to the Old World.”

The core conflict is change: an Old World erased for development. Every ancient tree felled for rail or construction pushes people further from “the great mystery, the foundation of all things.”

Grainier is one of progress’s instruments, unsure of his role and destined to feel its cost. He finds meaning in Gladys (Felicity Jones), who improbably approaches, loves and builds a small life with him on one acre of land. Their cabin, later home to daughter Kate, carries echoes of Malick’s pastoral idealism.

The delayed incident with the Chinese laborer becomes an omen as Grainier wonders whether deeds return to haunt. On another job he meets Arn Peeples (a nearly unrecognizable William H. Macy), whose musings mix philosophy and superstition. Soon after, Grainier returns home to wildfire smoke on the horizon.

With love comes loss, and Grainier is again left to endure in solitude. It’s an understated character and performance; Edgerton plays him as a quiet observer who struggles when attention turns his way.

“Train Dreams” may edge toward sentimentality, but Bentley’s film remains haunting, patient and dreamlike — an ode to a world vanishing before its inhabitants fully grasp it. [Abridged]

LINDSEY BAHR, MDT/AP Film Writer

“Train Dreams,” a Netflix release streaming Friday, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for “some violence and sexuality.” Running time: 102 minutes.★★★★