Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Rachel Keller, Jeremy Bobb
Nicholas Cage stars in documentarian Gabe Polsky’s (Red Army, Genius) fiction feature debut, a gripping frontier drama based on Stoner author John Edward Williams’ classic 1960 novel (and ‘anti-Western’), Butcher’s Crossing.
1874: A young, fresh-faced Harvard drop-out and minister’s son, Will (Fred Hechinger) decides he needs a taste of the wider world and journeys west. Meeting Miller (Cage), a surly, seasoned buffalo hunter, they travel into the dangerous Colorado wilderness – along with Miller’s compatriots, the disagreeable Fred (Jeremy Bobb) and God-fearing Charlie (Xander Berkeley) – to track down an elusive and potentially lucrative herd of buffalo. But the longer they’re away, the more obsessive and volatile Miller reveals himself to be, in ways that threaten to put their very lives at risk.
Shot in Montana, on gorgeous, rugged land owned by the Blackfeet Nation, Butcher’s Crossing has no illusions about the brutality of how the American West was won. It’s a tale of innocence lost and a thoughtful commentary on human nature, masculinity, and man’s relationship to the natural world, powered by a Brando-inspired performance from Cage.