Decent enough, but not a patch on Haigh's previous work

15-year-old Charley Thompson (Charlie Plummer) lives with his father, Ray (Travis Fimmel), who is drinking himself into an early grave. Finding work caring for an aging race horse named Lean on Pete, Charley is devastated when he learns that Pete's owner, Del Montgomery (Steve Buscemi), is planning to slaughter the animal. Determined to save his friend, Charley steals Pete, and the two set out on an odyssey across the modern American frontier.

Fans of writer/director Andrew Haigh will know his unassailable talent for what one might label unsentimental emotionalism; his films deal with intensely emotional situations without lapsing into Speilbergian fawnishness. And, although compared to the excellent Weekend (2011), and the masterful 45 Years (2015), Lean on Pete is a touch melodramatic, Haigh's talent for allowing character and theme to rise organically to the surface through quiet moments of introspection is still very much to the fore. So why not a higher score? Adapted from Willy Vlautin's 2010 novel of the same name, the biggest problem with the film is that things are laid on too thick; Charley is very much a Job figure, and suffers such a litany of misfortunes that one fully expects him to be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Similarly, the pseudo-allegorical nature of the characters he encounters is too on-the-nose for the realistic milieu Haigh has crafted. Part state-of-the-nation address, part bildungsroman, it's worth a look, but is ultimately lacking a satisfying thematic through-line.