Lily Gladstone Shines in the Heartfelt Indie Road Movie 'The Unknown Country' 

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• Courtesy Of Music Box Films
• Lily Gladstone plays a young woman who reconnects with her Oglala Lakota family in a powerful indie road movie.

Lily Gladstone is having a moment. The actor was raised on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation in Montana and shone in her roles in Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women and First Cow. This year, Gladstone stars in Martin Scorsese's highly touted Killers of the Flower Moon, coming in October; and Fancy Dance, one of the nominees for the Sundance Film Festival's Grand Jury Prize. And you can see her right now in an excellent rural road movie that premiered last year at SXSW: Morrisa Maltz's The Unknown Country, available for rent on various platforms.

The deal

It's snowing in Minnesota as Tana (Gladstone) carefully removes the handicapped tag from her rearview mirror. The small action speaks volumes: Tana has just lost her beloved grandmother, whose caretaker she was. Now, she drives — west through the snow to Spearfish, S.D., to attend the wedding of her Oglala Lakota cousin, Lainey (Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux). They visit the reservation, where Grandpa August (Richard Ray Whitman) tells Tana stories about her grandma's roving youth. From there, Tana heads down to Texas, hoping to find the site pictured in a haunting photo her grandmother left behind.

Will you like it?

The Unknown Country is not a plot-driven movie or one with conventional beats. For the first half hour or so, Tana barely utters a word. Not until late in the film, among friendly strangers in Dallas, does she open up about why she's on the road and what her grandmother meant to her.

Moody silence can be alienating in indie films when it feels like a too-cool-for-school attitude, a deliberate withholding of the emotional grounding we need to care about the story. That's not the case here, though, for two reasons. First, Gladstone barely needs any dialogue to show us who her character is. We get our emotional grounding from Tana's wariness in a dark gas station, from the care with which she smooths her grandmother's blanket in a flashback, from her joy as she plays with her cousin's daughter.

Second, the movie isn't just about Tana but about the people she meets on her long journey. Early in the film, passing through Deadwood, S.D., Tana stops at a diner with a warm, chatty server named Pam. Suddenly we find ourselves in Pam's home, meeting her rescue cats, as she tells her story in voice-over.

In these scenes, The Unknown Country veers from drama into documentary. The server, Pamela Jo Richter, is a real person who died since the film was shot and to whom it is dedicated, yet her tale has the pleasant roundedness of a good short story. We get similar glimpses into the lives of other walk-on characters, such as the proprietor of the motel where Tana stays and the gas station attendant who sells her matches.

One of these people, the owner of a Dallas retro dance hall, sums up a common theme of all these testimonies: Everyone needs a passion in life, something to live for. For the dance hall owner, it's giving an elderly dynamo named Flo (Florence R. Perrin) a place to two-step. For Tana's cousin Lainey, it's her husband and daughter (Jasmine Shangreaux), who's just old enough to narrate her own story: "I am Native American," she proudly tells the camera.

A lesser film might have presented Tana's brief encounters with these people as overt lessons for her, reminders that she needs to work through her grief and find a new guiding principle for her life. In The Unknown Country, they're simply part of the rich human tapestry of life on the road.

Director Maltz told the Austin Chronicle that one inspiration for the film was her own thousand-mile commute from her Dallas home to Spearfish, where her paleontologist partner was on a dig. Her intimate knowledge of the route shows in the driving scenes, which capture the hypnotic monotony of a cross-country trek: the watercolor reflections of taillights smeared across the windshield; the dreamy indie rock soundtrack alternating with a dissonant soundscape of talk radio, which grows angrier and more intrusive as Tana travels south.

Without overt messaging, The Unknown Country says plenty about living in the maelstrom of 2020 America. The film offers a counterpoint to the acrimony on the radio in the steadiness of Grandpa August, who reconnects Tana with her forebears and puts her on the path to a stunning journey's end.

The movie has one of the most beautifully executed last scenes I've seen in a while, but I would never have known about it if I hadn't specifically searched for newly streaming fare. As Gladstone and Maltz pointed out in an interview on RogerEbert.com, residents of rural areas are the least likely to hear about indie films, even when those films depict people like them with humor and sensitivity, as this one does. The Unknown Country is worth exploring.

If you like this, try...

Certain Women (2016; AMC+, Criterion Channel, Kanopy, IFC Films Unlimited, Tubi, Pluto TV, plex, rentable): Maltz has said she knew she wanted Gladstone for The Unknown Country after seeing her in Reichardt's ensemble film. Reviewing it, I wrote that "Gladstone's character exhibits a quality that no one else in the film has: the exuberance of youth and hope."

"Reservation Dogs" (three seasons, 2021 to present; Hulu): Gladstone also appears on this wonderful Indigenous-made comedy-drama series about four teens in the Muscogee Nation.

Nomadland (2020; Hulu, rentable): Chloé Zhao's Best Picture-winning drama is a spiritual sibling to The Unknown Country: Both are low-key, vibe-rich road movies that incorporate documentary elements.