At times, the film looks like a tour of a deserted planet, especially when she heads out to the Badlands national park in South Dakota, where there is also tourist-trade work to be had. Fern’s sister compares them to American pioneers. And in some ways this isn’t quite a postapocalypse: the nomads find work and their lives have a kind of purpose, even a nobility. I spent a few anxious minutes here and there waiting for what I assumed would be the inevitable incursion by violent Hells Angels or sneery materialists, but it never happened. Sometimes Nomadland looks like a very, very sweet and positive version of Mad Max – a film about a postapocalyptic US where the people riding around in vans and trucks are just hippy-ish souls who only want to help each other. The other fictional character is a nice, if maladroit person, a fellow nomad-tramp (David Strathairn) who has a crush on Fern. McDormand is a marvellous diplomat for this creative process. Zhao and McDormand have to steer her fictional existence into their actual lives, and steer their lives into an imagined world. In some ways, her character functions as the film’s interviewer, or ambassador to the real world. The people she meets on the road are, mostly, real nomads who have vivid presences on screen and McDormand’s modest, equable persona slots easily into this group. McDormand stars as Fern, a widow and former substitute teacher in Empire, Nevada – a town wiped off the map by a factory closure – who is forced into piling some possessions into a tatty van and heading off, something she accepts with an absolute lack of self-pity. Zhao was even allowed to film inside one of Amazon’s eerie service-industry cathedrals. So they have become nomads, a new American tribe roaming the country in camper vans in which they sleep, looking for seasonal work in bars, restaurants and – in this film – in a gigantic Amazon warehouse in Nevada, which takes the place of the agricultural work searched for by itinerant workers in stories such as The Grapes of Wrath. They are grey-haired middle-class strivers reduced to poverty who can’t afford to retire but can’t afford to work while maintaining a home. Nomadland is about a new phenomenon: America’s 60- and 70-something generation whose economic future was shattered by the 2008 crash. This quiet, self-effacing performance may be the best of her career so far. With artistry and grace, Zhao folds nonprofessionals into an imagined story built around a cheerful, resourceful, middle-aged woman played by Frances McDormand. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.

C hloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider.

Bruder nomadland