INTO THE WILD

This one is worth your time — if you're an adult who can sit with hard content in service of a true and moving story. INTO THE WILD, written and directed by Sean Penn, is a literate, soulful film about a young man's flight from society and his eventual discovery that the God and neighbors he ran from were what he needed all along. It earns comparisons to Jack London and lands some of the most inspirational, heartbreaking moments you'll see in a theater.

It also earns its caution rating honestly. The film includes very strong profanity, extended naturalistic nudity — including full nudity — and implied sexual content involving a minor's advance toward an adult (which he refuses). None of it is played for titillation, but none of it is brief either.

If you can watch that kind of exposure without harm to your conscience, this is a rich, rewarding film. If you're choosing for a family or a teenager, this isn't the one — the content, not the message, rules it out.

Christopher McCandless graduates from Emory with high honors and tells his parents he's considering law school. He has other plans. Chris and his sister have uncovered a secret about their bickering parents — one that finally breaks his patience with their materialistic, middle-class life.

Secretly, Chris gives away the rest of his college fund, abandons his car in a flash flood, burns his remaining cash, and renames himself Alexander Supertramp. As he treks toward the Alaskan wilderness, the film moves between his solitary journey and the people he meets along the way — each one leaving a mark on him before he ever reaches the wild.

Four stars means this is filmmaking of the highest order for Movieguide, and the source material backs it up. Sean Penn, directing and adapting Jon Krakauer's book, handles the material with a sensitivity that surprises. Emile Hirsch carries a not-always-likable character with real skill, and the film is studded with brilliant, heart-rending supporting turns — Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, and especially Hal Holbrook, whose performance is described as one of the most redemptive and heartbreaking in recent memory.

The result is tender and soulful, a movie that "pierces the heart and invigorates the mind." Its closing stretch is called among the most inspirational filmmaking in recent memory — poignant and bittersweet at once. This is craftsmanship matched to a story that deserves it.

This film starts in a Romantic worldview — a young man idolizing Nature, convinced that escaping society's rules will set him free — and ends somewhere much better. Chris discovers that Nature is beautiful but also dangerous, even ugly, and that his notions about it and about human civilization weren't true. More importantly, he finds God. Along the way he learns forgiveness, hears the command to love his neighbor at a crucial moment, and comes to understand that happiness isn't real unless it's shared.

The film is unusually direct about this: an elderly Catholic man teaches Chris about God and forgiveness, and another character speaks to him briefly about salvation in Jesus Christ. For a mainstream drama, that's a strikingly positive, God-centered turn — one that critiques rather than celebrates the "leave it all behind" philosophy the story starts with.

The ache underneath this story is an old one: a young man convinced he can find meaning alone, in nature, apart from other people — and discovering too late how wrong that is. Scripture named this centuries earlier: "Two are better than one... for if they fall, one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up" (Ecclesiastes 4:9–10).

This is a film that runs from God and ends up finding Him — told with real craft and a genuinely moving heart. It also asks a lot of its viewers in language and nudity, which is why our answer is the same one we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. If you're planning something for the whole family instead, start with our latest family-friendly picks.