Lean On Pete Explores Western Tropes With a Skillful Eye

British director Andrew Haigh’s Lean On Pete shares a deep kinship with Gus Van Sant’s early films. Haigh’s film especially evokes the love story of Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho — no mean feat considering Pete’s central act is a love story between teenage boy Charley (Charlie Plummer) and the titular horse, as opposed to between Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix.

As Haigh demonstrated in 2015’s 45 Years (which offered the great Charlotte Rampling her best performance since Under the Sand in 2000), his greatest skill is directing actors. But while Lean On Pete, adapted from Willy Vlautin’s novel, isn’t divided into chapter headings, it constantly changes tone and look. Haigh also gets a tremendous supporting performance from Steve Buscemi as an ornery racetrack manager. 

Fifteen-year-old Charley and his single dad Ray (Travis Fimmel) move to Portland, Ore., looking for a new beginning. But Haigh’s Portland is no Portlandia — this setting feels dangerous. Ray succumbs to his demons, and Charley spends his time taking care of an aging racehorse named Lean On Pete, until a series of potential and real tragedies send Charley and the horse on a road trip through rural Oregon in search of the boy’s aunt.

 With zero preaching or partisanship, Lean On Pete is a political film. It offers an outsider’s view of the emptiness of American individualism, the fragility of our families, our lack of a safety net and the ease with which people can sink from the margins to complete destitution. Granted, most of these themes undoubtedly come from Vlautin’s source material, but Haigh films the mean streets and dilapidated houses of the Pacific Northwest with an eye for grit and naturalism that never feels exploitative. It’s too bad the ending features a singer-songwriter tune that feels like an acoustic version of an empty, inspirational Katy Perry anthem over the closing scene and credits.

Still, Lean On Pete isn’t afraid to dig deeply into the iconography and tropes of the Western and use them to delve much further. Without the pop pleasures of Sean Baker’s The Florida Project, it offers a similar critique of contemporary America, very convincingly acted and directed with a fine eye.

Lean On Pete

R, 121 minutes

Opening Friday, April 20, at the Belcourt