Screenplay: Smoke Signals (screenplay)

Overview
Sherman Alexie’s 1998 screenplay Smoke Signals adapts stories from his collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven into a compact, character-driven road movie about friendship, fathers, and the power of storytelling. Set largely on and around the Coeur d’Alene Reservation in Idaho, it follows two young Native men whose journey to retrieve a dead father’s ashes becomes a search for truth, identity, and reconciliation.

Setting and Characters
Victor Joseph grows up tough and tight-lipped, shaped by poverty, basketball dreams, and the volatility of his alcoholic father, Arnold. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, an orphan with braids and big glasses, is a cheerful, compulsive storyteller whose tales bridge community memory and personal myth. Victor’s mother, Arlene, keeps their household together with wit and resilience. On the road and in Phoenix they meet Suzy Song, Arnold’s friend and confidant, who carries crucial pieces of his past. The reservation itself functions as a living character, punctuated by a deadpan community radio DJ, oddball humor, and resilient aunties like Lucy and Velma, famous for driving their car in reverse.

Plot
A house fire on the reservation during a raucous Fourth of July in 1976 kills Thomas’s parents; Arnold, drunk and panicked, pulls infant Thomas from the flames. The act makes him a hero in legend even as it seeds a private shame that will hollow him out. Years later, after bouts of drinking and violence, Arnold leaves the reservation and his son behind, heading to Phoenix. Victor hardens, resenting both his absent father and the stories that try to explain him.

News arrives that Arnold has died in Arizona. Victor needs money to retrieve the ashes and his father’s effects; Thomas offers his savings if he can come along. Reluctantly, Victor agrees, drilling Thomas on how to act “more Indian” with stoic silence. Their bus-and-backroads trip is dotted with microaggressions, small kindnesses, and comic set pieces, while flashbacks braid in the boys’ childhoods, Victor’s complicated love for his father, and Thomas’s faith in the redemptive power of stories.

In Phoenix the tonal center shifts from quest to reckoning. Suzy Song welcomes them at Arnold’s trailer and begins telling her version of Arnold: charming, broken, sometimes sober, haunted by the old fire. She reveals the truth Victor never faced, that Arnold accidentally started the blaze that killed Thomas’s parents and fled the reservation years later under the weight of that guilt. The revelation reframes heroism and blame, cracking Victor’s defensive shell. Suzy also shows that despite his failures Arnold kept Victor close in memory, saving clippings and mementos.

Return and Resolution
Driving back in Arnold’s old pickup, Victor and Thomas crash while swerving around a drunk driver. They pull the man from his wreck, a grim echo of the original fire that complicates easy judgment and recasts Victor as someone capable of rescue rather than harm. Victor softens, shares Arnold’s ashes with Thomas, and acknowledges a kinship that transcends blood. Back on the reservation, he faces his mother with clearer eyes and begins to accept both the love and damage he inherited.

Themes and Tone
Alexie balances dry, reservation-honed humor with grief and tenderness. The screenplay treats storytelling as survival: Thomas’s tales keep history alive and offer meaning, while Victor’s stoicism is a story of its own, shielding him from pain. Fatherhood, masculinity, and intergenerational trauma thread through images of fire and smoke, destruction, signal, and purification at once. The film’s iconic closing meditation on forgiving fathers turns personal pain into communal ritual, inviting complicated mercy without erasing harm.

Structure and Style
Cross-cut flashbacks, voiceover, and recurring motifs (fireworks, basketball, radio announcements, cars moving in reverse) create a collage of memory and movement. Dialogue snaps between elegy and joke, grounding political and cultural insight in intimate, specific lives. By the time Victor scatters his father’s ashes from a bridge into a wide river, the journey has shifted from retrieval to release, with story as the bridge between trauma and the possibility of home.