The Learning Tree

Newt (Kyle Johnson) is a teenager in Cherokee Flats, Kansas, in the 1920s, and he wants to be taken for a grown man before he knows what that costs. Gordon Parks, adapting his own semi-autobiographical novel, follows less than a year of fear, family feuding and small-town ambition that pushes Newt there anyway. Beneath it sits a plain question of values: what a boy owes his family, his neighbors and his own conscience.