A very good, sad and somewhat harrowing film about a young man - he's fifteen and should be at school, though he's not - living in Portland with a dad who is a drunk (the blurb describes him as an alcoholic, though that's not really apparent). He drifts into a casual job with a not-very-successful racehorse owner, becomes sentimentally attached to one of the not-very-successful racehorses, and triggers a series events that leaves him wandering across the western side of the United States and sliding deeper into its poorest and most desperate strata.
I was struck by all the terrible things that could have happened to him but didn't. Another character warns him that in the district where he is sleeping rough he is likely to get robbed, or raped; he doesn't, even though he is a very pretty young man. And there's a Hollywood-style happy ending, which is logical and plausible but not very likely. Most young people in this predicament end up dead or destroyed.
Watched at Lansdown Film Club in Stroud.
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