On the most basic level, Lean on Pete is about a teen and his love for a horse. But this isn't really that kind of movie. Andrew Haigh, the English filmmaker responsible for the recent gems Weekend and 45 Years, is interested in the collision between guileless innocence and hard-bitten reality in an America where so many struggle just to get by. The unknowing beast is a racehorse, but he's also a Trojan horse for deeply resonant and timely themes.
The film is a showcase for a very promising young actor named Charlie Plummer. Lanky, sensitive but assured, Plummer gives his character, 15-year-old Charley, a sense of raw decency maintained through trying circumstances. At first he seems so fragile he might break. As Charley's life gets harder, and he starts making his own questionable decisions, we see him stiffen in the face of life's harsh winds. Plummer, who made an impression in the small part of John Paul Getty III in All the Money in the World, controls Lean on Pete's emotional tone from starting gate to finish line.
Charley lives with his rakish, ne'er do well dad on the poverty line in Portland. On one of his long morning runs, he stumbles on the local racetrack and immediately enters the orbit of a crusty horse owner and trainer named Del (Steve Buscemi, who gets more wonderfully irascible with each passing year). Del takes Charley under his grizzled wing, pays the kid some spending money, and shows him the ropes. But he's no lovable uncle type (as if he could be with Buscemi playing him). Del is also just scraping by, and that means he runs his horses into the ground quickly before disposing of them.
"You can't get attached to a horse," a veteran female jockey (Chloë Sevigny) tells Charley. "You can't think of them as pets." But Charley longs for attachment. He needs it. He devours it. And when he realizes Lean on Pete has ceased his productivity to Del, he takes the reins and turns Lean on Pete down a more harrowing path.
That path also happens to be gorgeous. As Lean on Pete becomes a hardscrabble travelogue of the Pacific Northwest, it conjures a sense of frontier displacement and survival that could have sprung from a distant century. Haigh and his cinematographer, Magnus Nordenhof Jønck, favor long takes that reveal sweeping twilight vistas. But the grit and grime of life on the edge is always right around the corner. As Charley and Pete undertake their odyssey, the boy's calm demeanor starts to crack. Coming of age is rarely captured with this kind of hand-to-mouth desperation and attention to detail.
Based on Willy Vlautin's novel, Lean on Pete turns a boy-and-his-animal tale into a drama of abandoned youth. Rugged individualism is not something to aspire to here. It is, rather, a last resort, a hard place to land when all safety nets have worn through. Lean on Pete is a good horse, mostly because he doesn't let Charley down. That's more than you can say for most of the humans in the movie.
