A boy and a horse sounds like the premise of a Disney movie, but LEAN ON PETE is no saccharine equestrian tale.
With the pace of a trot rather than a canter, LEAN ON PETE is lean on action but fat on character.

Based on the book of the same name by Willy Vlautin, LEAN ON PETE is a superb evocation of adolescence, loss and, ultimately, hope.

The picture’s protagonist is a fifteen year old boy by the name of Charley Thompson who wants nothing more than some stability and structure in his life. As the single spawn of a single father who is an itinerant worker, structure and stability has been elusive.

Ironically, poignantly, symbolically, Charlie gets a job in a stable at the local race track. It’s a milieu of washed up jockeys, tarnished trainers and knackered horses, but it’s there that Charley meets Lean On Pete, the horse who becomes his companion.

Lean on Pete is owned and trained by Del, played in star powered scurrilous scrounge by Steve Buscemi, the quintessential colourful race track identity.

The washed up jockey chosen to ride Lean on Pete, Bonnie, is played to pragmatic perfection by Chloe Sevigny.

And Charley Thompson is given ennobling pathos and a genuine, generous, gormless grace by Charlie Plummer.

There’s an extraordinary ordinariness about Charley Thompson and his adventures in equine events. This ordinariness resonates with all our ordinary hopes – nothing lofty or outlandish – just a hope for basic humanity, a longing not to be lonely, not to lose hope or heart.

When Lean on Pete is diagnosed with navicular, Charley offers to buy him from Del, who refuses, so Charley rustles him, an equestrian quest of hard-scrabbling heartbreak.

LEAN ON PETE is undeniably downbeat and plaintive, but there’s a tenderness to have and to hold, heartbreaking but hopeful, against the downturns, trials, tribulations and transience of life.

Written for the screen and directed by Andrew Haigh, whose previous two features, Weekend and 45 Years were mini masterpieces of the minutiae of ordinary lives, LEAN ON PETE is another quiet achievement by a film maker interested in people as human beings not logarithms.