My wife took me to see Into the Wild last night in Fairbanks.

I was happy she suggested it, and even happier that we went. Here’s why:

There aren’t many movies out there that open with images of the place you live. Up on the big screen flashed all the frontier-feel buildings in Fairbanks—the Big I bar, Down Under Guns, the rescue mission, the coal-burning power plant. Even geese taking off at Creamer’s Field. Whoever decided on those clips has a good eye for local character.

I wasn’t sold, though. The book has been a great seller here in Fairbanks—about 150 miles from the bus where the main character died—as it has nationwide, but people here have disputed some facts, like author Jon Krakauer’s conclusion that Christopher McCandless died after eating poisonous wild potato seeds. UAF chemist Tom Clausen later tested the seeds and found nothing that would kill you. Krakauer later issued a revised theory that McCandless died from a mold that might have developed on the seeds, but the movie sticks with the book.

And local climber and geologist Jeff Benowitz remembers when he, hiking out from an attempt on an Alaska Range peak, slept in the famous bus and left behind a few paperbacks that Krakauer assumed McCandless packed in, and used in part to flesh out McCandless’s character.

So, I sat back and watched with a critical eye, waiting for irritating details about Alaska, like shots of ravens that have the voices of crows.

But, Sean Penn got me. His landscape sweeps of snow crawling down mountains, bees climbing stalks of fireweed, and McCandless’s last vision of the tops of spruce trees against an overcast sky were all convincing to someone who lives here and has spent a good deal of time out there. And the opening scene of a pickup driver dropping off McCandless at the end of a windblown Stampede Trail shows the hint of a trail going into the trees, a subtle detail that made me want to follow a trail into the quiet country.

But the real gold of this movie wasn’t the Alaska scenery, it was the storyline of a dreamy idealist, the people he attracted into his life, and his quest for something different. The book’s strength is in how Krakauer visited the fringe characters of McCandless’s life, like Wayne Westerberg in Carthage, South Dakota, and how McCandless affected them. The white-haired retiree Ron, played by Hal Holbrook, was striking as an aging man out there in America who has lived his life according to a set of accepted rules that have left him empty, and utterly alone. Their relationship is inspiring, beautiful, and sad.

I liked this movie because it conjured a spirit we have probably all had at one time in our lives or have admired in some other likeable, hard-to-hold, oddball. It reminded me of a time I hitchhiked from Fairbanks to Hudson Falls, New York; the adventure that came with each unpredictable new day and the need to trust strangers as they trusted you. It’s good stuff, but those sensations are also easy to bottle up in layers of predictable security. That’s why I think people have bought this book and will enjoy this movie—to some degree, Chris McCandless is in all of us, and here we get to see what might happen if we Let Chris Rule.

Because McCandless is dead, we’ll never know whether the movie and book are fiction or non-fiction, but it doesn’t matter. Into the Wild captured the essence of a person looking for something different, and the damage that journey can inflict on others.

And, as far as escapism goes, the landscapes of the California/Nevada desert and the wheat fields of South Dakota were nice to see on a dark winter’s night in Fairbanks. The most unusual sensation of the evening was walking out of the theater and finding ourselves back outside, our breaths showing in the air, the neon lights of restaurants across Airport Way cutting through the cold air. It was as if the movie had started all over again.

Postscript: Eddy Plumb and a few buddies just went to the bus. He posted his thoughts on his most excellent blog, with photos: http://edplumb.blogspot.com/2007/11/skiing-into-wild-night-at-bus-142.html