Despite its recent and long-coming fall from the clouds, America is still a great place to live, if you’re educated and work in an in-demand and lucrative field. But if you don’t have the right ingredients, America will chew you up, spit you out, and ignore you. In other words, America only treats you right if it finds you useful.
Director Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an authentic, absorbing and quiet character study of people America doesn’t find useful. Set in 2011, the film focuses on Fern, a woman who, like many Americans, uses her van as a mobile home while travelling between jobs through the stark and unfriendly American desert.