Review: On a solo drive through ‘The Unknown Country,’ a new star rises

The better road movies understand that pointed wandering is more intriguing than aimless purpose and that a journey’s smaller spaces can convey as much, if not more, than its vast, open ones. Morrisa Maltz’s fleet, engaging feature debut, “The Unknown Country,” an indie charting a lonely, grieving Native American woman’s revitalizing path along a highway of the American Midwest, also projects a deep truth about cinematic light sources: Lily Gladstone is a powerful one, indeed.

Gladstone will be on everyone’s radar later this year when her already celebrated turn in Martin Scorsese’s eagerly awaited historical crime epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” reaches the masses (and the awards industrial complex). Indie audiences and critics, first magnetized by her alert stillness in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 film “Certain Women,” have been waiting for others to catch up. We can be cynical about it taking seven years or we can celebrate getting two bursts of her star wattage this year, with “The Unknown Country” and its blend of fictional and documentary elements well suited to her sturdy, luminous humanity.

She plays Tana, who we first see setting off from Minneapolis in the icy dead of night behind the wheel of an old, white sedan to attend a younger cousin’s wedding in Spearfish, S.D. She looks nervous about it, and in time we learn why — Tana harbors a lingering sadness about the death of a beloved grandmother, whom she’d home-nursed to the end, and is hesitant about revisiting tribal lands and family members she hasn’t seen since she was a kid.

She’s also a woman traveling alone in a divided America that invades her car like an unwanted passenger when the talk-radio politics get especially doom-laden or when the vibe from the bearded SUV driver at the next gas pump turns inexplicably menacing. In the movie’s early going, director Maltz, cinematographer Andrew Hajek and editor Vanara Taing wring plenty of atmospheric tension from the moody energy of a solo road trip: sun glare through a windshield, a neon sign’s buzz, car lights punctuating the chilly dark. And, of course, Gladstone’s exquisite way with guardedness and melancholy.

Richard Ray Whitman and Lily Gladstone in the movie “The Unknown Country.”

(Music Box Films)

Counteracting that uneasiness are the warmer souls Tana encounters, whom we learn, in brief voice-over interludes, are actual people, not actors: a chatty diner waitress, a kindly motel owner, a corny gas-station manager and the affable South Dakota extended family who make up the wedding party. (The one getting married, Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux, gets a story credit along with Maltz, Gladstone and editor Taing.) Reminiscent of Chloé Zhao’s forays into mixing reality and fiction “Nomadland” and “The Rider,” Maltz’s recipe for “Unknown Country” is less about a smooth blending of the two — narrative isn’t this movie’s strong point, or even its mission — than a meaningful meander, capturing a heartfelt tapestry of community and spirituality.

We’re supposed to see the effect of all this goodwill and support on Gladstone’s face, and we do, as she leaves the Pine Ridge reservation with a suitcase of her grandmother’s and a mission of ancestral connection that takes her all the way south to the picturesque desert mountains of Big Bend in Texas. Though not before a beers-and-line-dancing pit stop in Dallas that feels random, save the fact that her flirty scenes with new friend Isaac (actor Raymond Lee) have a beguiling charm and her twisting at the dance hall with 90-something Flo (a real Texan) is as sweet as it sounds.

Sometimes, “The Unknown Country” may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming. We know the actor is going places.