For too many years, Hollywood relied on American Indians for cowboy fodder, and even in this enlightened age, filmmakers rarely break Indians out of their feather-adorned molds. That director Chris Eyre's debut, Smoke Signals, was made entirely by American Indians and features an all-American Indian cast is remarkable, but by no means the film's greatest achievement. What's truly remarkable about Smoke Signals is the depth of the narrative, a touching tale of self-discovery that sends Adam Beach and Evan Adams from a Coeur d'Alene reservation in Idaho to Phoenix, where they are to pick up the cremated remains of Beach's long-absent father. Eyre's film continues in the proud storytelling tradition of many Native American tribes, and the details he incorporates—like two women whose car only runs in reverse speeding backwards down the highway, or a radio traffic man whose broadcast van has broken down and limited his reports to a record of whatever scattered trucks pass by his static vantage—are entertaining and at times affecting. A sense of injustice does run throughout Smoke Signals, adapted by Sherman Alexie from his book of stories The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, but the film is not just about the plight of American Indians or the American government's well-documented neglect of the reservations it created. Instead, Smoke Signals is about two young Coeur d'Alene finding their voice and coming to grips with the world in which they live.