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A beautiful and transporting film. Frances McDormand obviously picks her roles with great care, and she was born for this one. She stars here as Fern, houseless (not homeless, as she clarifies) and living on the road ever since Empire, Nevada became a ghost town following the closure of the mine that ran the economy there.
Like her previous film The Rider, Chloé Zhao fills her film with non-actors (real nomads in this case) which gives it a remarkable sense of intimacy and verisimilitude. Much of the film is set in the wintertime desert, and it is extraordinarily beautiful. I’ve driven from Northern California to Las Vegas several times in winter and much of the drive looks just like that, and it made me nostalgic for those trips.