Early in Sean Penn's new film, Into the Wild, a pickup truck driving across a frozen landscape drops a young man off at the literal end of the road. The young man is Emile Hirsch, who portrays Christopher McCandless, the Annandale native who sent his $25,000 life savings to Oxfam and disappeared abruptly after graduating from college in 1990. The man driving the truck is James Gallien, who also happens to be the same man who dropped the real McCandless off near Denali National Park in the Alaskan wilderness 15 years ago. It's a fitting opening for a film that attempts to inject the reconstruction of McCandless' journeys with as much truth as possible. Penn uses non-actors throughout the film, lending the film an air that is realistic without seeming documentarian.

After Jon Krakauer published his popular book reconstructing the travels of McCandless in 1996, opinions on the young man tended to fall into one of two camps. For some, he was a folk hero of sorts, a wide-eyed idealist bravely shunning the constraints of a culture obsessed with controlling the populace through materialism and arbitrary rulemaking. For others, he was a crackpot hippie, a drifter who likely was mentally ill, and whose lack of respect for the nature he desired to commune with led inevitably to his death. The truth, as is usually the case, probably lies somewhere between these poles. Though it's unlikely anyone really got to know McCandless well enough during the two years he was missing for anyone to really know what that truth is. So Krakauer's book, and now Penn's film, lay out his journey based on McCandless' diaries and the accounts of people he met during his travels as "Alexander Supertramp" and let audiences be the judge.

They have their own biases, of course. Krakauer cops to his own in the opening of his book, and Penn is just as quick to establish McCandless in the film as a sharp and intelligent young man who abandons society for all the right reasons. But Penn gives no one a free pass, McCandless included. His parents receive the harshest treatment. Interesting, as they gave Penn permission to film the movie after ten years of knowing his interest in it, fully aware of how they were going to portrayed: as loveless, humorless parents whose treatment of their children (as told in narrations by Jena Malone as McCandless' sister). As for McCandless, the romanticizing of his character so often derided by critics is tempered somewhat by scenes that hint at troubles deep down in his mind that are masked by his easy smile and friendly nature.

Penn's script handles the duality deftly, but Hirsch is the real star. After forgettable turns in dreck like The Emperor's Club and The Girl Next Door, the actor has turned to more challenging material, and Into the Wild is his coming out party. It's a demanding role. McCandless spends a great deal of time alone, watching the world around him, with no one to talk to, and Hirsch gives his character life even when there is nothing in the script for him to say.

And for Penn, the film is a pinnacle as well. While not prolific as a director, his three previous features revealed a confident hand with intimate and dark character studies. No surprise considering the roles he gravitates towards as an actor. Into the Wild, though, is both more accessible (even at a rambling two hours and twenty minutes) and more uplifting than any of his previous films, without compromising his keen insight into his protagonist's heads. He plays the storyline of McCandless' two year journey tramping through America parallel to his time in isolation in Alaska, the former a rollercoaster ride of a road movie, the latter a meditative and intimate piece that grows increasingly desperate by film's end.

The supporting cast is stellar. Vince Vaughn reins in his usual schtick as a farmer who employs McCandless for a time. Catherine Keener plays against type as a sensitive and sad-eyed middle-aged hippie traveling the country in an RV with her husband, who is played with surprising depth by the film's Marine Coordinator, Brian Dierker, who had no previous acting experience. It's Hal Holbrook that nearly steals the film, though, as a lonely old man who befriends McCandless not long before he heads to Alaska. Holbrook's scenes are a joy to watch, for both his performance and the transformation his character goes through. In all these interactions, McCandless takes on a Messianic countenance that will surely annoy those who are irritated already by the story. But for those willing to entertain the possibility that modern life is, indeed, rubbish, and that indulging wanderlust for the purposes of finding oneself can be a rewarding undertaking, the story speaks volumes. Penn indulges a fascination with the diverse and heartrendingly gorgeous landscapes of this country throughout, in sequences often accompanied by a hauntingly gorgeous soundtrack of songs by Eddie Vedder. In these moments he reveals that his film is just as much about a deep and abiding love for America, set against a critique of the uglier aspects all that beauty exists alongside.

Into the Wild opens today at E Street Cinema, Bethesda Row Cinema, and Loews Cineplex Georgetown.