Reese Witherspoon produces and stars in this fervent film version of Wild, adapted by Nick Hornby from the wilderness memoir by essayist Cheryl Strayed, and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée – an account of how, in order to exorcise personal demons, she masochistically hiked alone over 1,000 miles along the daunting Pacific Crest Trail, unprepared for the extreme temperatures.

Witherspoon brings an angular pain and determination to the role, and her intelligence raises the film above what might otherwise have been a contrived and indulgent “personal-growth” story, a roughened-up version of Eat Pray Love (2010). As Cheryl slogs grimly along in the middle of nowhere, there are moments when the flashbacks insist rather too pedantically on the pressure points of anxiety in Cheryl’s earlier life.

But Wild is engaging and watchable, comparable to the recent Tracks (2013), an account of Robyn Davidson’s journey across the Australian desert. It’s an interestingly gendered antidote to the very male treatments of similar ideas in movies like Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007) and Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours (2010). Witherspoon is very good at conveying an earlier and later self: variously younger and older, naive and wised-up. It’s not Witherspoon’s personal masterpiece: that is still her high-school careerist in Election (1999). But it’s still good.