Lean on Pete an Overlooked Treasure

Lean on Pete (2018)

Directed by Andrew Haigh

A24, 121 minutes, R (solely for language and a ridiculous rating)

★★★★

The perfect antidote for a summer’s worth of mindless rubbish is to watch films that got drowned out by the Hollywood hype and money machine. Such a film is Lean on Me Pete, which was made for $8 million—chump change in movie production terms—but only earned a quarter of that at the box office. That’s not because it’s not a good film; it’s because it got relegated to festivals and art houses. And, of yeah, it was made by a British director who isn't afraid to poke holes in the myth of the Golden West.

Lean on Me Pete is a coming of age film, but not one cut from the private school/sunny beaches/rich parents/fireworks in the sky romance sense. Our protagonist is 15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) and the unfolding drama is viewed mostly from his perspective. He grows up mobile and semi-feral, courtesy of his widower father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), who loves his son but is no one’s idea of a role model. Ray has recently uprooted Charley again, this time from a small rural town in Oregon to the seedy outskirts of Portland. Charley consoles himself in running, Ray in being unemployed, boozing, and womanizing. Theirs is the sort of home in which canned soup and cereal pass for meals, and the cereal is kept in the fridge to keep the roaches out of it.

Most 15-year-olds long for freedom; Charley just wants a normal life, though he’s not even remotely sure what that is. Charley has a good heart, but he’s woefully undereducated, has the table manners of a goat, and the naivety to believe his father can take care of him. He does, however, find that his new home is near a run-down horse track. There he meets Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), an owner and trainer, though his stable is of the sort that races at carnivals, country fairs, and tracks the likes of which Justify never saw and never will. Charley isn’t afraid of hard work and soon parlays $10 for shoveling horseshit into an apprenticeship with Del that will take Charlie to some of the aforementioned tracks.

Del turns Charley into a groomer and stable boy through classic on-the-job training. Del’s not exactly guardian-of-the-year material either, but he does teach Charley to eat properly and gives him semi-regular work, which is better than Ray can manage. Charley is hungry in every way a person can be famished: literally, emotionally, and psychically. He is outwardly stoic, but that’s such a thin mask that everyone sees through it. Del’s best life advice comes when Charlie begins to exercise the titular Lean on Pete: “Never let go of the rope,” a metaphor I invite you to stretch.

Lean on Pete becomes Charley’s de facto confidant, the silent partner in whom he confides his inner thoughts. In like fashion, Charley saddles up to Del’s jockey friend Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), as if she were a surrogate older sister. Problems abound: a horse is a horse, of course, of course—something Bonnie and Del repeatedly tell Charley. Lean on Pete is “just a horse,” says Bonnie, and he’s a  quarter horse at that, a short-race sprinter. Once Pete loses his speed—artificially enhanced when Del can get away with it—he’s off to a Mexican dog food factory.

Among the many virtues of Lean on Pete is that it’s never quite what you think it will be. Circumstances will send Charley and Pete on a long journey toward Wyoming, where Charley hopes to find his aunt. At this juncture you might be tempted to think of John Steinbeck’s epic Travels with Charley, with a nag pinch- hitting for a tail-wagger. Nope. This one is not a simplistic boy-and-his-steed tale. Nor is it an elegiac stroll across Big Sky country; it’s more sage brush and forays onto Skid Row, the latter filled with the desperate, not desperados. Charley’s coming of age saga is about survival, not identity formation, and that means it’s sometimes a harrowing story about a minor in peril.

Cowboy hats off to Andrew Haigh for resisting cheap sentimentality at pretty much every juncture where a less confident director would have tossed us nostrums and a goes-down-easy resolution. If you saw All the Money in the World, perhaps you already suspected that Charley Plummer has promise; watch him in Lean on Pete and all idle doubts vanish in the arid flatlands of central Oregon. Plummer presents as determined-but-uncertain, lanky, scuffed, and a bit gawky—a lost boy not yet adapted to an adult body.

This film is a real treasure and it’s a damned shame that it has been overlooked. See it and pass the word. It won’t win any Academy Awards come next February, but I can assure that it’s better than half of the films that will.

Rob Weir