Bittersweet, sad but hopeful, Lean on Pete is a quiet film about a quiet boy at loose ends. That boy, Charley (Charlie Plummer), lives in a small town of little houses and limited opportunities. It’s summer and Charley is alone most of the time watching TV in a shack with almost no furniture. One day, while walking past a racehorse stable, he encounters Del, whose petulant whine identifies the actor as Steve Buscemi before his face becomes visible beneath the tractor hat. Del pays Charley to help load one of his horses onto a trailer. The sad-eyed quarter horse, called Lean on Pete, becomes Charley’s best friend.
Everyone and everything in this adaptation of Willy Vlautin’s novel is at dead-end or in decline. Charley’s mom disappeared years before and Charley lives with his affable loser dad. Del has never been near the Triple Crown and endures falling fortunes and interest in the farm league horse races he enters at dirt tracks and second-string carnivals.
Del’s jockey, Bonnie (Chloë Sevigny), keeps her backstory as a woman in a man’s world mostly to herself. She once was injured on the track and went to work at Red Lobster but returned to racing because the money is better than waitressing, even in the declining field where Del competes. Charley picks up folding money working with the horses and—after a jealous husband beats his dad to death—sets out on the road with Del and Bonnie.
The often-flustered Del isn’t a bad man but bends every rule in the interest of his own survival. Doping isn’t just for American cyclists and Russian gymnasts. Horses can be given performance-enhancing drugs as well. Del isn’t cruel but his compassion doesn’t extend to a horse that has outlived any chance of winning. Bonnie agrees. “You can’t think of them as pets,” she warns Charley. However, the boy’s affection for Lean on Pete is as unswerving as it is emotionally moving, especially in the face of Del’s threat to sell the poor creature to Mexico, where he will be turned into cat food and glue.
Lean on Pete isn’t a Hollywood movie and British writer-director Andrew Haigh keeps the story from going down expected, well-trodden paths of sentimentality. The film has almost no music—no maple syrup strings or NutraSweet piano telling us what to feel. The austerity extends to the cinematography, with many of the best scenes framed at night or in darkened rooms, and to the landscape of the American Northwest—the dusty hinterlands far from Starbucks and tech start-ups. Charley is a sensitive boy in an insensitive world and eventually embarks on a harrowing quest through the decrepit underside of America in search of home. We wish him luck.
