The jangle, hum and hiss of Denis Johnson’s writing, first published when he was a 19-year-old undergrad at the University of Iowa and later stamped with the National Book Award, found me by mistake. “Car-Crash While Hitchhiking,” the short story responsible for Bethany, Missouri’s place in the literary canon, wasn’t supposed to be there. But there it was, in one of the cubbies at the Dey House, sitting on the stack of what I thought was actually assigned to read that week.
I don’t mean to suggest God stapled and placed it there — Johnson, an Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum and faculty member, had done a reading at the Dey House just a semester before — but I believed in things after finding the kind of stuff in this scene, when a woman learns what’s happened to her husband in the crash: “The doctor took her into a room with a desk at the end of the hall, and from under the closed door a slab of brilliance radiated as if, by some stupendous process, diamonds were being incinerated there. What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I’ve gone looking for that feeling ever since.”
It seems silly to do anything other than rubberneck such an image, such a sound, but of course someone had to go and make it into a movie. That, in 1999, was the first attempt to adapt Johnson’s work. There have been two since. The latest, Train Dreams, opened this year’s Refocus Film Festival at the Englert Theatre. The rest of the weekend, shared with the Iowa City Book Festival, turned into a celebration of Johnson and his work (including a special appearance from the Kansas family in “Car-Crash”).
Now that Train Dreams has finally made its way to Netflix, Little Big Screen is hosting afties.
Train Dreams (2025)
Directed by Clint Bentley
The sun seems to always sit on either side of a new day in the life of logger, Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton, wringing cosmic depth out of his face’s creases), and his wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones, never not haloed by her hair in the just-right light). They happen to be alive at a time of great change in American history — we watch Grainier’s work on a railroad wash away in a single cut — but didn’t live long enough to see the midnight releases of the Harry Potter movies. I was thinking about those movies, and more specifically, the annoying stances certain Potterhead classmates would take back then, complaining about the absence of Ron Weasley’s pet bird or whatever. Because I must admit, I felt a similar irritation when I saw how Clint Bentley and co-writer Greg Kwedar (swapping roles from Sing Sing) had messed with Denis Johnson’s novella and made the Grainier character … a pretty good guy? But then their ending, even more of a radical departure, brought maybe two minutes of final moments with this Grainier, and it all fell into place. Train Dreams is an instant don’t-kill-yourself classic.
Stream it on Netflix.
Stars at Noon (2022)
Directed by Claire Denis
Taylor Swift, something of a director herself, didn’t bother to mention Claire Denis’ Denis Johnson adaptation by name when she posted about recording Midnights with Jack Antonoff while their partners — Joe Alwyn and Margaret Qualley (both actors) — were shooting Stars at Noon 4,000-some miles south of New York City. The novel of nearly the same name is set in nearly the same place, Nicaragua, but Clair Denis changes the time, turning the romantic thriller into a COVID-19 pandemic period piece.
The two lovers on the poster, Trish (a graduate from the Tri-Delt school of journalism played by Qualley and her endless scribble of hair) and Daniel (a British oilman played by Alwyn and his vérité neck beard), are slowly suffocating from more than N-95s. Heat is in the air and around every corner of their almost certainly doomed honeymoon. “Let’s just die here,” she says to him, lying in bedsheets as sticky as the weather, not wanting to get out.
Stream it on Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Jesus’ Son (1999)
Directed by Alison Maclean
In my 20s I had taken to many stupid routines. One was buying copies of Jesus’ Son, the collection of short stories that opens with “Car-Crash,” from a now-dead site called Discover Books for a few bucks a piece. I did this until I lucked into a first edition, first printing, which was sooner than never, but nevertheless left me with a sizable collection. So I gave away the third or whatever printings as party favors for years. This is all to say: Jesus’ Son means too much to me. I don’t want anyone else’s images to replace my own.
Alison Maclean, the director of the first-season episode of Sex and the City, “Valley of the 20-Something Guys,” with Timothy Olyphant, does an all-around alright job with Denis Johnson’s somewhat-autobiographical gospel of doing dumb shit. The book’s cast of convenience-store types who know more than most and yet can’t help themselves is filled with the famous faces of Billy Crudup, Jack Black, Holly Hunter, Dennis Hopper and Michael Shannon, so you know you’re getting a good hang. Johnson is there, too, as a man with a “stabbing headache.”
(P.S.; During a reading at Refocus Film Festival, Cindy Lee Johnson, Denis’s wife, settled once and for all that you should not pronounce the apostrophe in Jesus’ Son. This is on account of some little-known grammar thing that meant a lot to Denis, but also, that’s the same way Lou Reed sings the lyric the title’s taken from.)
Stream it on Tubi. Rent it on Apple TV and Prime Video.
Hit Me (1996)
Directed by Steven Shainberg
Denis Johnson’s one feature-length screenwriting credit, adapted from a Jim Thompson novel, is for a film so forgotten it’s free to watch on YouTube and nowhere else. Sad to say but Hit Me, as yellow and blue as a football jersey, doesn’t deliver the wallop promised in its title. (You can really only hear Johnson when William H. Macy, who’s also in Train Dreams, shows up to talk about capital punishment.)
The Prom, a long-short film Johnson wrote with Steven Shainberg (Secretary) a few years earlier, is the real free-on-YouTube find. You should watch it over on Vimeo where Andras Jones, who stars, along with Jennifer Jason Leigh, has uploaded it in watchable quality.
Stream it on YouTube (and Vimeo).
