NOMADLAND

Frances heads west in her campervan (or McDormobile, if you will).

OUT 19 MARCH CINEMAS

Inspired by Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction book Nomadland: Surviving America In The 21st Century, Nomadland is a film about a phenomenon caused by the 2008 stock-market crash – the many Americans heading towards retirement age or beyond who lost their homes and now lead an itinerant lifestyle. Living in camper vans, they go where the seasonal work takes them, much as the Joad family travel to California during the Great Depression in The Grapes Of Wrath.

If that sounds like comedown cinema of the lowest order, it’s not – although director Chloé Zhao (Marvel’s upcoming Eternals) makes no attempt to take the scenic route while chronicling a hardscrabble existence that entails long nights shivering in a tin can on wheels, flat tires, breakdowns (machines and flesh) and defecating in a bucket. But with the bad and the ugly comes the good in a sense of freedom and frontier spirit, of fluent community and vistas to make John Ford quiver.

Frances McDormand plays Fern, a widow forced to flee the town of Empire, Nevada when the factory she works for closes. Her demeanour is as matter-of-fact as her cropped haircut, so she loads some belongings into a van and leaves any self-pity behind as she hits the road. We, like her, discover this brave new world as she goes along, meeting many of the real-life nomads mentioned in Bruder’s book and a few more that Zhao and McDormand met as they planned their route. As in Zhao’s previous micro-masterpiece The Rider, fact and fiction become almost indistinguishable, though a sliver of plot is introduced in the possibility of romance with fellow traveller Dave (David Strathairn, the only other professional actor on this remarkable journey).

Is Fern – and indeed the various people she encounters – running away, or chasing something? Is a life of independence and the kind of pioneer spirit that built America better or worse than the American Dream of home, family and professional success? Zhao is too skilful a filmmaker and too compassionate a person to offer definitive answers, but rather leaves viewers to draw their own conclusions. What is without question, though, is that Nomadland is terrific filmmaking, driven by the most unadorned performance of McDormand’s considerable career. Like the picture itself and the community it portrays, she casts off anything surplus to get to the naked truth. How ironic that it will likely saddle her with many more possessions in the form of awards; this could well be the road to Oscar number three. Jamie Graham