The Associated Press This image released by Searchlight Pictures shows Frances McDormand in a scene from the film "Nomadland." (Searchlight Pictures via AP) The great recession didn’t just eliminate jobs, it also erased an entire town. Six months after U.S. Gypsum closed its doors in Empire, Nevada, a company town since 1948, its zip code was retired and its inhabitants forced to leave. It’s this brief history that opens Chloe Zhao’s extraordinary ” Nomadland,” which follows one of those residents, Frances McDormand’s Fern, on a journey through the American West to nowhere in particular. Fern is a vandweller, partially by choice and partially by circumstance — the shuttering of Empire, the costly and slow death of her husband and a deep-seated desire for solitude and exploration have left her with few connections and even fewer possessions, which she whittles down to the essentials and the most sentimental. Everything else is left in a storage unit off a desolate, snowy highway that looks like it is quite literally in the middle of nowhere. It might as well be on the moon.