So this is Chloé Zhao’s first full-length movie, back in 2015. It takes place on a Lakota reservation, and it uses non-professional actors to explore the social realities of that place; if there’s such a thing as American neo-realism, this is definitely that.

The movie follows a couple of kids; the youngest girl is still pretty straightforwardly an innocent kid, but the older boy is at that age where he’s starting to get into some shit and make some fuckups, and he’s teetering on the cusp of falling into a fuckup life or taking a better direction.

The movie also gives us a lot of adult characters who are in full-on fuckup mode — the two kids have an older brother, who’s out of jail briefly; their mom isn’t making great life choices; and their absentee dad dies as the movie begins. But, this being Zhao, none of those characters are ever unsympathetic or flat — the jailbird older brother, okay, he gets drunk and gets in a fight and is hauled off back to jail, but you can tell that he really loves his little sister, and he’s a great artist and has all kinds of ideas about things. He’s just not quite able to get it all put together, because of the drinking.

Alcohol is definitely the big negative through-line here. The protagonist boy is working as a bootlegger (the sale of alcohol is banned on the reservation) and getting into trouble, and his customers are buying his liquor and getting into trouble with it. And so there’s this kind of amorality to what he’s doing — not just breaking the law, but doing so in a way that’s clearly causing harms — and how much he’s going to see that and change his ways is one open question about how his life will go.

The other is whether he’ll stay on the reservation with his family and his community, or if he’s going to get out and go to Los Angeles. His girlfriend is going to college, and he plans to kinda tag along, with vague and nebulous plans; she kinda wants him to, but (you sense) kinda also doesn’t want him to.

It’s a slow burn of a movie, one of those character studies where you just get thrown into the milieu and immersed in a half dozen people without even understanding how they relate to each other, and the first half of the movie is spent figuring out who’s who and what matters and where the movie is even going to focus. Like, for all that I didn’t give a bunch of spoilers above, you’re probably a good solid hour in before you realize everything I’ve said.

Even in her first film, Zhao’s strengths are apparent — she’s amazing at filming people in striking landscapes; she’s got a real subtlety to her portraiture of characters that brings out the little interior details of their lives. This didn’t blow me away like Nomadland did, but it’s still good. Recommended.