The Simple and Atmospheric Train Dreams Feels Steeped in Reality—But Is It Based on a True Story?
Spoilers ahead.
One of the most buzzed-about films from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival was Train Dreams, an atmospheric film about a loggerman over the course of many decades in the 20th century. Joel Edgerton stars as Robert Grainier, a simple man whose job requires him to be away from his wife Gladys (Felicity Jones) and their young daughter—something he struggles with, especially as tragedy strikes back home.
Written by Sing Sing filmmakers Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, and directed by Bentley, there’s not much more to be said about the story when it comes to plot: The film immerses audiences in its emotions instead. Its simplicity might leave viewers wondering whether this was based on a true story, or whether it’s purely fiction. Picked up by Netflix and now streaming on the platform, here’s what to know about Train Dreams and its origins.
Is Train Dreams based on a true story?
Unlike Bentley and Kwedar’s previous film, Train Dreams is not based on a true story and Robert Grainier was not a real person in history, though his arc was clearly inspired by real stories from the era of railway expansion in the 1900s. Based upon a 2011 novella by Denis Johnson, Bentley and Kwedar told Tudum that they were drawn to the book’s “infinite quality—one that feels so lived in and so specific, but is ultimately one that defies our human vocabulary,” adding that this is the first time they had adapted fiction for the screen.
Johnson, who did not give many interviews prior to his 2017 death, told the LA Times in 2014, “As a storyteller I’m drawn to realistic, contemporary situations and to figures caught up in danger and chaos.” While Robert is not a contemporary character, it’s hard to deny the reality of his life’s circumstances, and the danger and chaos of the growing world that his story conveys.
Felicity Jones and Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams.
American railroad expansion boomed in the 1900s following the country’s Civil War, employing thousands of workers like Robert to construct train tracks that would connect the many pockets of rural farmland populations to major cities. According to the University of Iowa, “the era was also one of rapid industrialization and technological innovation,” as railroading forced upgrades to locomotives, freight cars, brakes, and gauges. It also brought on “the creation of four standard time zones across the country, allowing trains to run on schedule, the increased use of steel rails, and the bridging of major rivers.”
Is Train Dreams a faithful adaptation of the novella?
Bentley and Kwedar’s script quite faithfully follows Johnson’s work, which packs a lot of story into 116 pages. “It’s a really slim book, yet it covers an entire life, and it covers a very specific time in the world,” Bentley told Tudum. “It’s a book structured around memories, and it’s kind of all over the place. Trying to retain that spirit of the book and fit that into a structure that can work in a film without losing the aspects and the qualities of it that are really charming and are really special—some of the wooliness of it and the strangeness of it—was always the challenge, but that was also the excitement.” In following the book’s third-person limited point of view, the film also employs narration to provide structure to Robert’s journey.
Still, the film made some small changes. In the novella, Robert joins his fellow white laborers in attempting to throw a Chinese worker over a bridge after he’s accused of stealing; Robert begins seeing the man everywhere, thinking he’s been cursed. In the film, Robert isn’t involved in the attempted murder but is haunted by his inaction, which manifests in the vision of the Chinese man. Long after his family is gone, the book depicts his hallucinations of his daughter as a “wolf girl,” while the film makes her visually plausible as his child, though just as imaginary.
Bentley told Tudum that while he and Kwedar wanted to stay true to Johnson’s book, they also let the script go where it needed to. “It was a constant exploration of trying to find what that balance was. I read the book five or six times, really trying to internalize it, and then I left it behind to let the script evolve into the story I wanted to tell.”
Is Train Dreams representative of real loggers’ lives?
Joel Edgerton as Robert Grainier.
Historical accounts of real loggers in the 20th century chronicled the work as brutal. “Railroad construction crews were not only subjected to extreme weather conditions, they had to lay tracks across and through many natural geographical features, including rivers, canyons, mountains, and desert,” according to the Library of Congress, which describes a similar scene to that in Train Dreams. “Like other large economic opportunity situations in the expanding nation, the railroad construction camps attracted all types of characters, almost all of whom were looking for ways to turn a quick profit, legally or illegally. Life in the camps was often very crude and rough.”
Bentley and Kwedar spent time in the Pacific Northwest to gain a feel for the film’s setting and to honor the story that Johnson penned. “We try to bring a deep level of research to what we do, and this film was no different, but it’s hard to research something that’s about a time gone by,” Bentley told Tudum. “We went up to the area where Denis Johnson lived and where the story is set while we were writing, and stayed in a cabin along the river where Grainier would’ve lived. We met loggers in that area and people whose parents and grandparents had been loggers. I wanted to make sure that we were completely loyal to the spirit of the book that Denis had written, but also let the adaptation take its own path to become the movie that it needed to be.”