Nine-year-old-year-old Callie-Rose (the extraordinarily talented Australian actor Lily LaTorre; Run Rabbit Run) needs the Wi-Fi to do her homework. The trouble is, there's no signal because her dad, a reticent cowboy named Dusty (an excellent Josh O’Connor), is living in a trailer on a FEMA campsite, his farm having burned down in wildfires.
This quiet, beautiful film, directed by Max Walker-Silverman (A Love Song) with a great score by Jake Xerxes Fussell and James Elkington, is set in southern Colorado. There’s an atmosphere of John Prine-esque melancholy running through it, and indeed one of his songs, How Lucky Can One Man Get, is on the soundtrack.
Trees are charred, the vast landscape is bleached and brown. People have lost everything in the fires, though Dusty owns the 200 acres that belong to the ranch that’s been in his family for generations. He returns to survey the footprint of its rooms and shows them to Callie-Rose, who lives mainly with her mother, Ruby (Meghann Fahy; Sirens, The Perfect Couple; The White Lotus; pictured below) and cannabis-cultivating grandma (Amy Madigan; American Woman; Weapons). Dusty and Ruby were childhood sweethearts; now she’s remarried.
Dusty is a picture of loneliness and dejection. His body language is hunched, as if he wants to hide. He’s found soul-destroying work with the highway department, holding a stop and go sign. He has plans to go to Montana where a cousin may be able to give him some seasonal calving work. His confidence is so shattered that he can barely summon up the energy to speak to Ruby, who tells him in a business-like way that it would be helpful if he could look after Callie-Rose at his place for a bit.
His daughter, who loves reading, is the conduit that brings him back to the world. Neither of them smile or talk a lot but her self-contained, positive outlook – “I could be a cowboy,” she says with confidence – moves mountains. His miserable trailer with its shaky plastic fitments – there’s no running water until one of the neighbours, a plumber, gets it going – is slowly transformed under her influence. Can he really leave her for Montana?
First there’s the search for that elusive Wi-Fi signal, which they find at the local library. It’s closed, of course, but someone parked outside alerts them to a notice on the door, so there they sit in the back of the truck as dusk falls while Callie-Rose reads aloud from her sturdy, school-supplied iPad: a story about a boy and his magic boots that allow him to travel anywhere he wants.
These aren’t real neighbours and this isn’t a real home, Dusty tells Callie-Rose. But she makes friends with another kid, Lucy, and they trampoline together and ask Lucy’s mum (Kali Reis; True Detective: Night Country) if they can have a sleepover. Yes, though not on a school night, is the reply. They may have lost everything, including Lucy’s dad, who stayed to protect the house, but there are still boundaries.
And slowly a small community is built (pictured below), with everyone eating together, talking about the things that got left behind and singing around the campfire (Binky Griptite of the Dap Kings, who played with Amy Winehouse, plays one of the neighbours – not a big part, but what a pedigree). Callie encourages Dusty to join in the conversation. “Now you go,” she tells him. What he misses, he says, is the routine: feeding and milking the cows, the stock count, rotating pastures.
He tries to get a bank loan but, the manager tells him, this “high-severity burn” means that he won’t have a hay crop for about 10 years. There’s no land to borrow against. All the man can offer is leaflets about aid organisations. At first, he’s devastated but slowly Dusty realises that the important things in his life are still there. Beginning again in a place that’s still home may be an act of mad defiance – who knows when the land will burn again – but there are people with the same degree of hope around him, and that helps. And the relationship between father and daughter is unforgettable, even though sentimentality does creep in during some final scenes.
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