The charm of Stephen King’s The Long Walk, published in 1979 under the name of his bad-boy alter-ego Richard Bachman, comes from how much camaraderie shines through the edgy, angry, harrowing premise: A group of boys from each U.S. state, chosen by lottery, compete to see who can walk the longest. If they drop their pace too many times, or stop, or desert, they’re shot in the head by the silent soldiers driving alongside them. The single remaining winner never has to worry about money again, and gets whatever he wants as a prize. That gamble—putting your life on the line in order to pay for the rest of it—is only alluring in a society that has already failed its citizens. That’s fitting, because the idea for the dystopian competition and its collection of pseudo-willingly tortured young men originated during King’s freshman year at college, when he was a young man witnessing Lyndon B. Johnson escalate the Vietnam War in the mid-’60s. But just as America has remained unfair, unfeeling, and unforgiving, the relevance of the pulp story’s death march has persevered—as has the brief beauty found in solidarity, even when powerful forces pit us against each other.
The chummy, affecting Long Walk adaptation from Francis Lawrence (the Hunger Games franchise filmmaker who knows a thing or two about last-man-standing competitions) is all about these sublime moments of connection. As bloody and upsetting as King’s fable can get, at its heart, it’s a 100-minute walk-and-talk between some of the best young actors out there, shooting the shit and trying to stay sane while trudging through a trenchant metaphor.
Much of that conversation is driven by Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), a nice enough guy dropped off at the starting line by his mom (Judy Greer, the only actor stuck with nothing to do). Affable and curious, he falls in with his new comrades/competition and meets the swaggering Pete McVries (David Jonsson). Hoffman warmly leads the pack—especially when he taps a deep, personal well during a monologue about his character’s late father—but it’s Jonsson, with a breezy range and compellingly nuanced expressions, who proves himself a movie star. There’s no room for anyone in the cast to hide; they’re all just steadily heading towards Jo Willems’ camera, trying to find the truth in the core of some of King’s traditionally awkward dialogue.
Ray and Pete become thick as thieves as quickly as everyone turns against the group’s sniveling little misanthrope Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer). Others in the mob are defined even more broadly, but find nuance by the time they’ve clocked a hundred miles: Collie (Joshua Odjick) is a tight-lipped pessimist, Arthur (Tut Nyuot) a poor Southern Bible-thumper, Hank (Ben Wang) a motormouth jokester, and Stebbins (Garrett Wareing) an inscrutable ironist. Even those who make less of an impression still make one before they go—and that’s not a spoiler; that’s the nature of the Walk.
The burgeoning relationships between its band of brothers make for moving, masculine tragedy that one typically doesn’t find outside of old war movies. The desperation uniting these young men serves as a realistic counterpoint to the macho cartoon of their overseer, The Major (Mark Hamill), the secret police head fetishizing the big swinging sacks of those under his command. For every tasteless punchline of Hamill growling out the kind of rhetoric that would lead a teenage conservative to nickname himself “Big Balls,” there’s an exchange of honest intimacy between the walkers.
Lawrence and writer JT Mollner pace out these developing connections, balancing them with the shellshocking violence that erupts from the ends of the soldiers’ rifles with more and more frequency as the film marches on. Enhancing this contrast, Mollner softens many of the competitors from the novel and removes some of King’s more juvenile details, making the main cast—especially Jonsson’s Pete—more earnest as they suffer. And yet, even that doesn’t make the crushing story any more palatable. The novel threaded the boys’ psychological spiraling into the framing of the narrative, adding uncertainty and delirium to the plot. Here, Mollner keeps the contest detached from the competitors’ fraying psyches: There is no escape from what’s happening, no looks away, not even into the depths of their deteriorating minds. It becomes a grungy, sweaty, Walter Hill-like slog through hell.
That relative realism, though, doesn’t mean The Long Walk is pure physical turmoil or a gauntlet of punishing logistical details. The camera is almost always on the cast’s faces, eschewing too many shots of ruined soles or pulverized feet or other tactile indicators of the wear and tear that this process takes on the human body. It saves these observations for its gruesome bursts of bloodshed, graphically stealing characters away with the quick report of a gunshot. The Long Walk will never be one of King’s perennial cable reruns because of this intense gore, and because it allows its stupid young men to curse like stupid young men. But that doesn’t mean it’s not relatable viewing for an entire country afflicted by economic insecurity, unchecked gun violence, and the invasion of a militarized Gestapo.
The meandering small-to-large talk bantered about by the boys helps draw the parallel between troops in the trenches, drafted into a conflict they can’t possibly understand, and the bottom rung of the workforce, trapped in nine-to-fives they can’t possibly escape. The social forces that bind us together even under extreme duress, the impulse to stick up for our pals and snub the assholes, persist even when ground under the various brands of exploitative boot worn by capitalism. The Long Walk knows that clinging to your humanity as a dead-end nation attempts to snuff it out isn’t a victory—and it might not even be possible in the long run—but it’s all that’s available to many of us. Heavy times demand B-movies with heavy hands, and depicting a young man with a bullet in his brain, facedown on the asphalt, as a crowd sings “America The Beautiful” still has plenty of angry, defiant punch. Despite the stamping of hundreds of feet, The Long Walk smolders with the blunt power of a burned flag.
Director: Francis Lawrence
Writer: JT Mollner
Starring: Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Garrett Wareing, Tut Nyuot, Charlie Plummer, Ben Wang, Roman Griffin Davis, Jordan Gonzalez, Josh Hamilton, Judy Greer, Mark Hamill
Release Date: September 12, 2025
