An Ode to America's Spiritual Frontier

Sean Penn sings a powerful and poetic hymn to America with "Into the Wild," his sweeping, sensitive and deeply affecting adaptation of Jon Krakauer's best-selling book.

When the book was published in 1996, it became an instant classic of American literary nonfiction, at once heir to the adventure writing of Jack London and Rockwell Kent and such generational touchstones as "On the Road" and "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." Penn, who wrote and directed the screen version of "Into the Wild," has preserved the book's most iconic, even mystical values, while carefully whittling away Krakauer's multilayered narrative to focus on its confounding protagonist: Chris McCandless, the 24-year-old recent college graduate who in 1992, after two years of tramping through the American West, embarked on a 113-day sojourn in the Alaska backcountry that ended in his death.Sean Penn