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Victor and Thomas (Adam Beach and Evan Adams), the leads of Chris Eyres’ Smoke Signals (1998), are forever bound by a blaze. In 1976, on the Fourth of July, a house fire on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation where they were raised claimed the lives of Thomas’ parents. Then an infant, Thomas was saved by Victor’s father, Arnold (Gary Farmer), who unhesitantly darted into the home to grab him alongside Victor and his mother. In the years since, Thomas has come to look at Arnold as a kind of hero. Victor, though, sees the latter only with resentment. A decade or so ago, Arnold, tormented with alcoholism and prone to domestic violence, one day tore off in his yellow pickup truck, never to be seen again. Any affinity Victor and Thomas once had disintegrated around the same time when the socially inept Thomas wondered aloud if Arnold perhaps left because he simply didn’t like his son.

In Smoke Signals, these boys bound by fire — and who have since developed into opposites, with Victor taciturn and hardened and Thomas moon-eyed and compulsively talkative — are brought back together when news hits the reservation that Arnold has died. Victor wants to journey down to Phoenix to retrieve his ashes but doesn’t have enough money. Motivated by life-saving appreciation and maybe a hunger for renewed closeness with Victor, Thomas offers some extra cash to get him there on the condition he can tag along too.

Thomas’ chatty odd-birdness sometimes can stumble into flat-out annoyance in Smoke Signals. But the odd-couple humor guiding this road trip is mostly charming. And necessitating Victor get to better know someone whose image he’d already mostly cast in amber works as a nice narrative complement in a movie overarchingly about his character having to reconcile his relationship with his father. He’s indignant at this man, whom we get to know in well-deployed flashbacks, for all the shitty treatment he subjected him to. But the more Victor learns, the more sympathetic he becomes toward a man with more demons than his son realized. (Much clarity is provided by a woman, winsomely played by Irene Bedard, with whom Arnold had struck a friendship before his death close enough to make her the immediate keeper of his ashes.) 

Smoke Signals, written by Sherman Alexie (who here adapts his 1993 short-story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven), is forced to carry the improbable weight of historical cinematic significance: it’s been billed “the first feature-length film written, directed, and produced by Native Americans to reach a wide audience both in the U.S. and abroad.” But it tells its story, peppered with the lived-in details of Victor and Thomas’ particular reservation, of vexed friendship and grief with an ease and spiritedness that feels largely unencumbered by the heaviness of outside expectation.