Nomadland, Chloé Zhao’s exquisite, empathic Oscar-tipped feature about a sixtysomething woman who takes to itinerant van life after the closure of a mine vanishes her livelihood and Nevada town, doesn’t flinch from the vagaries of the human body. As Fern, a widow who joins the ranks of older American “Recession refugees” roving the country for seasonal work in an increasingly fragmented, tenuous gig economy, Frances McDormand shivers and sneezes in the cold cab of her van. She observes a presentation by a veteran “wheel estate”-er at the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous, a gathering for these mobile elders in Arizona, on the various buckets available as in-van toilets; it comes in handy when a surprise bout of diarrhea forces her to hustle from bed to bucket seat. She bathes in the majestic (fully nude, in a pristine river; alone in the moonlike terrain of the Badlands) and endures the grossly human (as a temp worker at an RV campground, she cleans restrooms trashed and clogged by travelers who know someone else will be stuck with the mess). The stretches of country observed in Nomadland hum with contradictions – sprawling landscapes and cramped vans, loners united in the face of a cruel and unforgiving economy, resilient people who ship packages and pick crops, underseen yet patiently observed here. The film presents not so much a “hidden America” – if you have driven to some national parks or interstate tourist attractions, you’ve probably pulled over at the rest stops where Fern and her newfound friend Linda May (playing a lightly scripted version of herself, as do many of the film’s characters) work as groundskeepers, or eaten at a diner like the one Fern temporarily buses, or driven past farms staffed by seasonal workers. It’s more an America – and in Fern, an older and uncompromising woman – that rarely garners mainstream attention. Since its premiere at last year’s Venice film festival, Nomadland has garnered industry praise as a likely frontrunner for the best picture Oscar (the film was initially slated for wide release in 2020, but will now be released in select theaters and on Hulu). The word of mouth is warranted; watching Nomadland felt like slipping into a mist tunnel of feelings – yearning, restlessness, belonging, loss, the drive to feel overwhelmed by vastness, the balm of disarming conversation – and waking up to a rain-soak of emotion. It feels revelatory, in the hazy space it holds between real people and composite character, and in the latitude given to an uncompromising, undaunted woman over 60. Zhao, 38, has in the past half-decade become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after directors through an unusual route: a trio of quiet, resolutely non-commercial films set in the expansive American west starring, in full or in part, non-commercial actors playing versions of themselves. Since her 2015 debut Songs My Brother Taught Me, filmed on the Pine Ridge reservation in south-western South Dakota, Zhao has honed a film-making style that might be described as adaptive realism – clearly narrative, but skimming close enough to real stories, and real lives, to be virtually indistinguishable from truth. Her breakout, The Rider, cast Lakota cowboy Brady Jandreau as Brady Blackburn, an injured rodeo competitor weighing permanent brain damage and his livelihood on horseback, inspired by Jandreau’s own injury and starring his real-life friends and family. With her first two films, Zhao trained her outsider’s outsider perspective (she was raised in China and arrived in Los Angeles, in 2000, for the end of high school) on to an Indigenous community in the American west, one not unfamiliar to visitors – film-makers, journalists – hoping, with however good intentions, to tell a story and go. In Nomadland, Zhao expands her roving, porous interest in the slipstream of rural American life to the loose community of migrants cast adrift by the punitive wages of late capitalism. The film plays like an artistic spin on a good journalistic feature that records people and places usually glossed over, in part because it’s born from one: the 2017 book of the same name by the journalist Jessica Bruder, who spent three years and 15,000 miles on the road, attending the Rendezvous and working stints, like Fern, as a beet farm processer and Amazon warehouse employee. (It’s worth noting that not all itinerant work holds this nostalgic, cinematic appeal – characters in the film, like the book, are mostly white, as migrant workers of color, particularly undocumented workers from Latin America, face restrictions and risks on the open road). Zhao’s film taps directly into Bruder’s reporting; lines in the movie, such as Linda May describing her consideration of suicide when, broke and aged out of the workforce, she hit the road, mimic her own quotes from Bruder’s 2014 feature The End of Retirement, which expanded into the book. That blurring of the reality line is perhaps what makes the film so potent: it’s difficult to access the emotions, to understand the pull toward obliteration by insignificance, or the warm, restless dynamics of a campground, without immersion. But a full-fictional, Hollywood treatment – the kind that flattens regional distinctions into “red-state” or “rural America”, that amplifies and stretches trauma for character motivation, that barely ever centers an independent woman over the age of 40, that privileges propulsive storytelling over quiet observance – would rob the film version of its rich, lived-in experience. I could imagine a much louder, kinetic picture, that would feel much flatter for it. Nomadland observes an America not so much forgotten as ignored, or never seen in the first place. The film redirects attention to where the cinematic gaze is usually fleeting, and often made by those inured to glazing over service work, alternative living situations, older people, women in general, and particularly older single women uninterested in stagnation, cordiality or disappearance. For Fern, there’s no trite redemptive arc or revelation, just as there’s no restoring her town and old memories. Instead she dances on a cliff, gallivants around postcard sunsets, keeps moving, saves herself. She’s dwarfed by the Arizona desert and the larger forces at play in her uprooting, but her single story, one among the many real ones glanced by Nomadland, looms large, if only we choose to listen. Nomadland is out in select US cinemas and on Hulu on 19 February and in the UK on 9 April