A wistful tale of one boy and his horse
Lean on Pete
15 cert, 122 min
Dir Andrew Haigh
Starring Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Travis Fimmel, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Zahn, Amy Seimetz
‘Don’t run, walk!” barks Del (Steve Buscemi), a prickly horse trainer, as his teenage assistant bolts off on an errand through a crowded stable. But 15-year-old Charley Thompson – played by Charlie Plummer, the young John Paul Getty III in All the Money in the World – isn’t the walking type. Charley was even running when Del met him, haring through whatever small Oregon town he and his genially deadbeat father (Travis Fimmel) had just washed up in. For Charley, running and living are indistinguishable. To stay still would be as good as dropping dead.
This is the crux of Andrew Haigh’s piercing and wistful new film, in which the British director swaps the Norfolk Broads of his Bafta-nominated 45 Years for the significantly broader American west – a hard, vast place of dreary diners, grumbling trucks, and starlit open plains. Adapted from the 2010 novel by Willy Vlautin, Lean on Pete is a boy-and-his-animal film in the fine old tradition of Lassie Come Home and Old Yeller – and in 18-year-old Plummer, it has a lead actor who becomes a star before your eyes. But it forswears kitschy pathos for a slow-build, almost neo-realist compassion for Charley and his faithful companion, the five-year-old quarter horse of the title.
Charley and Lean on Pete, a sprinter by breed, are kindred spirits – two knots of bony joints built for onward movement. So when Del offers Charley a job as his assistant, he jumps at the chance to get moving with him – first to race meets up and down the country as part of Del’s crew, and then later, when Charley’s circumstances take a turn for the worse, by striking out alone with the horse on a crosscountry trek towards an aunt he hopes might provide them both with a home worth stopping for. At no point on this journey does Charley actually ride Pete: instead, like friends and equals, they just clop along side by side.
Charley and Pete’s bond is all the more charming because it’s so carefully underplayed. The boy happily rambles to his fellow traveller but there is never any sense that what he’s saying is being listened to, let alone understood. In fact, Charley’s co-workers explicitly warn him about getting too sentimental over the animal. “Don’t think of them as pets,” advises Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), a jockey who rides for Del and is privy to some of his shadier schemes. Del takes an even blunter approach.
“I used to like horses too, you know.”
Buscemi is an old hand at stringy curmudgeons, but Del is a subtler and more complex creation than most of them: genuinely well-meaning as a mentor to Charley, he’s also, professionally speaking, a treacherous schlub. And as Charley’s father, Fimmel pulls off the same trick in reverse: he’s a plainly dreadful parent, but impossible to dislike.
A quick scene in which father and son eat breakfast together fleshes out their relationship with dazzling economy, from the uproarious table talk about his father’s seemingly innumerable exes to the way Charley nimbly forks up the last sausage a split second before his old man can reach it.
Lean on Pete might lack the emotional wallop and meticulous structure of 45 Years, or Haigh’s earlier film Weekend – much like its two dust-blown protagonists, it just keeps trotting onwards, meeting whatever scrapes and ne’er-do-wells that fall in its path. But it still rings with the small, revelatory details of great drama – those bright, beautifully observed moments of humanity that jump out like glints of glass in the desert.