Lean on Pete

Cast: Charlie Plummer, Steve Buscemi, Chloe Sevigny

Director Andrew Haigh has built a speciality in crafting tenderly affecting films around people in romantic partnerships revealing their inner lives. His first film was Weekend, which brought together two Londoners over a single weekend and built a cinematic romance for the ages, while 45 Years inverted that by having a marriage crumble after the revelation of a decades-old secret. Haigh has had a change of pace, however, with Lean on Pete. It’s a road movie, of sorts, about a teenage boy named Charley and a horse named Lean on Pete that is destined for the slaughterhouse. Stealing him in the middle of the night from the Oregon stables where he works, Charley and Pete cross paths with a number of people on their journey that teach Charley about life while also allowing the British filmmaker to say things about America. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and shows Haigh as a truly world-class director.