Lean on Pete

This film is a traumatically beautiful drama that's surprising in a low-key way; it's moving and haunting. The unconventional way the plot unfolds is one of Lean on Pete's great virtues, so to describe it in too much detail feels wrong -- but it's important to note that child poverty and homelessness are central to the story. These themes are dealt with head-on, sometimes brutally. There will be inevitable comparisons to The Florida Project, but perhaps not since Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's City of God or Hirozaku Kore-eda's Nobody Knows has there been so affecting a portrait of kids struggling to survive on their own. Unlike those films, however, Pete's protagonist has no one to turn to. He's truly alone.

Writer-director Andrew Haigh (45 Years) is definitely one to watch. You might expect the story of a boy and a horse on a journey to be sentimental, but Pete never comes close to earning that description. Haigh's unadorned style sinks viewers into story and character. There are no sweeping camera moves, no swelling strings to tell us how to feel or give us distance from Charley's struggles. In fact, there's barely any score at all. Something as cinematically ordinary as a fistfight has real consequences. There is some humor; it comes from recognition. And while there are "name" actors in Pete, their performances are almost all impressively grounded. Buscemi's introduction gets a laugh because Del's language and attitude are what we've come to expect from him, but the rest of the way, he just is his character. Like most people in the film, Del is neither good nor bad. Sevigny and Steve Zahn turn in similarly unadorned work that's a perfect fit for the film's world -- which is a high compliment. With deceptive simplicity, Haigh allows his characters to be as multifaceted as real people generally are. They don't feel like symbols placed to convey a moral. That said, throughout Charley's sometimes-harrowing journey, there is a through line: the undeniable need for love. Haigh skillfully builds that essential drive within Charley, so we feel his longing and his heartbreaks. Plummer's unselfconscious, totally committed performance certainly deserves to be remembered. We simply believe him. Without trying too hard, Lean on Pete delivers a profound meditation on the will to survive and the necessity of love.