Film 'The Unknown Country' showcases the talents of actress Lily Gladstone

It’s a rare privilege when you can say you were there to see a star being born. At the 2016 Sundance Film Festival premiere of Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women,” I found myself seated among 1,200 film fans, critics and industry players, most of us lured by a high-wattage cast that included Laura Dern, Michelle Williams and Kristen Stewart. And yet, after the credits rolled, all anybody wanted to talk about was Lily Gladstone. Who? This unknown actress from the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana came out of nowhere and stole the hearts of a celebrity-crazy, seen-it-all crowd. Playing a lonely ranch hand longing for Stewart’s harried night school teacher, Gladstone didn’t have a lot of lines, nor did she need them to articulate the plaintive yearning at the center of Reichardt’s quiet mini-masterpiece. Eight years later, I still get a little sad when thinking of her aching expression during the movie’s crushing anti-climax. It’s the kind of “who the heck was that?” performance you don’t forget.

An audience beyond the arthouse got to have a similar experience with Gladstone this past fall, stunned by her work as the broken heart of Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” With her sly eyes and Mona Lisa smile, Gladstone provides the serene soul of a movie roiling with anguish and toxicity, the center around which heavyweights like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro swirl. It’s an astonishing performance, and one of the few good things about the absurdly prolonged pageantry of awards season has been seeing Gladstone recognized alongside the kind of household names she’s been stealing scenes from since “Certain Women.” The “Flower Moon” phenomenon has also revived interest in Gladstone’s previous work, which didn’t have the luxury of massive marketing campaigns by Apple.

“The Unknown Country” played in a number of theaters last summer, but for whatever reason never made it out to the Boston area. It’s kicking off the first weekend of the Brattle Theatre’s “(Some of) The Best of 2023” series on Friday, Jan. 19, and this is a movie I’m glad I was able to catch up with. Gladstone stars as Tana, a young Oglala Lakota woman living in Minneapolis who has spent the past two years caring for her grandmother during a devastating illness. After the funeral, Tana packs up her grandma’s Cadillac and hits the highway, ostensibly to attend a cousin’s wedding in South Dakota. Then she just keeps going.

The film follows Tana’s trip from Minnesota all the way to Texas’ Big Bend National Park, moving from the chilly winter landscapes of her grief to the warmth of the sunny, southern climes as our depressed, closed-off protagonist learns to open herself up again and rejoin the world around her. Most movies would saddle us with a monologue explaining the character’s journey and marking her personal growth, but director Morissa Maltz knows she doesn’t need a voice-over. She has Lily Gladstone. It’s captivating watching her watch people, allowing us the space to intuit what’s going on internally with Tana without anybody blathering about it on the soundtrack. Gladstone’s minimalist approach is so effective it can be jarring whenever Matlz overdoes it with the music, or resorts to hackneyed slow-motion POV shots that feel redundant given what we can already see on the star’s face.

The movie is a documentary-narrative hybrid in which Gladstone improvises scenes with regular people that the director met on her own road trips over the years. (That’s co-producer Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux’s real wedding that we’re watching.) It’s a similar structure to “Nomadland,” except without all the fatuous, condescending baloney about the nobility of poverty. “The Unknown Country” is dedicated to Pam Richter, a waitress at the Hickok House in Deadwood, South Dakota who was uncommonly attentive to her customers (as well as a large number of adorable adopted cats, one of whom “decided to divorce her family and come live with me”). Pam’s only one of the many delightful and uniformly friendly folks Tana encounters on the road. Occasionally, when their scenes are over, the movie spins off into little mini-documentary portraits of these people, a device so endearing you’ll wish the movie had done it more often.

Shot in increments between 2017 and 2020, the movie was made during a particularly fraught moment in American history, but we see none of that reflected in the interactions onscreen. Tana drives, day and night, hearing voices on the car radio prophesizing doom, while the people we meet are all generally kind to one another. So much of the modern media hellscape incentivizes demonizing others and dwelling on our differences that I think we forget how much we all still have in common. This might sound like a dangerously Pollyanna-ish view, especially during this particular election year, but it’s also refreshing to spend 80 minutes or so watching ordinary people treat one another with dignity and respect, and then get on with their days.

“The Unknown Country” can admittedly be a little thin. A late-film pub crawl in Dallas with the charismatic Raymond Lee (one of the only other professional actors in the film) brings a flirty, romantic spark that the movie could really have used more of. The movie feels slightly unfinished, as if the filmmakers are still figuring out the structure while we’re watching it. But hey, there are worse ways to spend an hour and a half than driving around the country with Lily Gladstone.

“The Unknown Country” screens at the Brattle Theatre on Friday, Jan. 19. It’s also streaming on MUBI and available on VOD outlets.