"Flicka" is based on Mary O'Hara's 1941 classic, "My Friend Flicka." That book told the story of the dreamy younger son of a Wyoming rancher who found focus and love in his admiration for a mustang foal. This edition, perhaps inevitably, performs a sex change on the material: As director Michael Mayer ably tells the story, it focuses on the younger daughter of a stern rancher (singer Tim McGraw), though the diagnosis is the same. She's dreamy and flighty, what most educators would recognize as a dead giveaway for "creative," but anathema in the practical world of horse ranching in the high mountains of the Cowboy State. Not that Katy (Alison Lohman) is a softy. In a private-school classroom, she can hardly force herself to pay attention; in the real world, she can ride like a boy and rope like a man, and she loves the Goose Bar Ranch on which her father is perched, like her father's father and perhaps before him. And who could blame the two of them for loving a landscape so vivid and beautiful?

Depending on your point of view, the best thing or the worst thing about the new "Flicka" is that it has no time for fibberty-dee about "feelings." It's much more interested in how people get the job done, western-style, and that involves grit, labor and discipline. Then for fun, they go jump off perfectly fine horses to roll in the dirt with angry, squealing cows in something called "rodeo."

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

-- Stephen Hunter (Oct. 19, 2006)

Contains profanity.