Ed Radke's second feature is a road movie that, like the best films of the genre, is less about traversing geographical space than it is about exploring the painful emotional terrain of loss and desire. In THE DREAM CATCHER, the transformative evolution that results from such exploration occurs in two young men. Freddy is a wiry young delinquent whose identity hangs suspended somewhere between the overwhelming rigors of becoming a teenaged dad and the equally daunting prospect of finding his own father, who has just been released from jail and is working in Oklahoma City. Albert is younger but shares Freddy's search--he has escaped from a van full of juvenile delinquents, and he makes Freddy his unwilling traveling partner on the road to Reno where his mother lives.

As the two young men hop trains, steal cars and hitch rides on their long journey, they gradually glean a streetwise savviness built on defensiveness. As they grow to depend on each other, however, they also develop a much more important kind of wisdom, one only available to those willing and able to trust someone else.

Radke gets strong performances from his two leads, and Terry Stacey's cinematography includes many stunning sequences of landscapes slipping by, a blur of trees and sky that perfectly suggest their interior struggles.