The early 20th century, at least in the popular imagination, is an odd bridge of eras. A baby born on a farm in 1899 would’ve been much more likely to ride a horse than drive a car — yet that same baby would have a pretty good shot of living long enough to see the moon landing. In the west, the trappings of frontier life remained; in the east, traders worked on Wall Street by day and saw Broadway shows by night.

Robert (Joel Edgerton), the protagonist of the excellent drama “Train Dreams,” is adrift between those eras, working on railroads and in logging camps in the Pacific Northwest. He’s got a young family — a beloved wife, Gladys (Felicity Jones) and an infant child — and he works long stretches away from home to keep them warm and fed in a house he built by hand. His jobs speak of pr

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