The central character is an unschooled teenaged farm boy. He and his father, along with numerous others there, must leave, for the success of their farm work—in retrospect, a grim inadvertent irony—makes their agricultural tenure superfluous.  The boy and his father and others thus leave their country village to participate in the Dnieper River dam-building project. Ivan is eager to prove himself.  His first industrial labor takes strength, which he possesses in abundance; he is pounding spikes in the building of a railroad.  In a marvelous subjective-expressionistic montage we see the boy, aglow, drinking in the applause that he imagines his labor entitles him to.  But his work is deemed “sloppy” by the foreman, deflating the boy, who resorts to another adolescent fantasy—but this one, instead of preening, anxious:  himself, standing, explaining to a seated committee that the foreman hadn’t even inspected his work. The film patiently tracks the boy’s progress as he himself comes to realize his need to submit to the discipline of training and education.