A Perfect World, a story of love, friendship and camaraderie

Texas, 1963. Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), a dangerous and intelligent criminal with a tortured childhood that left him with wounds to his private parts, escapes from Huntsville Penitentiary with another inmate.

During their escape, the two are forced to take hostage an eight-year-old boy, Philip (T.J. Lowther), who lives with his devout Jehovah's Witness mother and his two sisters, both abandoned by their father.

Agents like Ranger Red Garnett (Clint Eastwood) and criminologist Sally (Laura Dern) will continue to track the fugitives, and the kidnapping case takes on an increasingly risky character and characteristics of criminal knowledge.

Growing up between kidnappers and hostages. A friendship that is both beautiful and strange, that, while stealing from and trusting each other, is very exciting because there is a sense of freedom between the two.

As noted by screenwriter John L. Hancock, some aspects of the plot are similar to Brave Man Alone (Miller, 1962).

It incorporates echoes of westerns, especially the sublime sequence of Sally and Red's late-night conversations.

The filmmaker is at pains to show us that he is most interested in losers and children, and the relationship between the child's innocence and Butch's status as a fugitive in Justice, Philip's search for the father he never had and Butch's concern that made him see the child as a projection of his own childhood.

Indeed, in the days that followed, Butch assumed the role of the ideal father to his son while feeling appreciated and respected by his son.

The film tells a story of love, friendship and camaraderie, following the maturation of a boy who discovers many things in just a few days: about the importance of clothes, fun, entertainment and children's attractions for children; about the obstacles that stand in the way of play and entertainment, the inconvenience of moral codes; the biographical background of criminal acts; the spiritual causes that often lie behind them; the breadth of the possibilities of human redemption, etc.

Reject fanaticism, especially religious fanaticism and certain police brutality, as well as the exaggerated opportunism of some politicians.