Lily Gladstone’s Great New Movie Shows She’s No One-Hit Wonder (2024)

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs. The script, by Tremblay and Miciana Alise, bears some resemblance to that acclaimed show, in that both involve the lives and longings of one or more Native American teenagers living on a reservation in Oklahoma: Reservation Dogs was set in the Muscogee Nation, whereas Fancy Dance takes place mostly in and around the land of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, with some dialogue in the Cayuga language. But the extralegal shenanigans of the kids on the reservation assume a more tragic dimension in Fancy Dance, a movie that takes place against the ominous backdrop of the nationwide epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women.

When her sister Tawi (Hauli Sioux Gray) abruptly disappears, Jax Goodiron (Lily Gladstone) finds herself responsible for Tawi’s 13-year-old daughter, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). Jax is a loyal sister and a loving aunt, but she’s also a fiercely independent and sometimes off-putting loner who makes a living from small-time hustles and, when economic times get tough, sells drugs for a local crime lord. Jax has done jail time in the past for this and other petty offenses‍—which means that when an investigator for child protective services arrives to evaluate Roki’s living situation, they have a legally airtight if flimsy pretext for taking the child out of her home on the reservation and placing her in the care of her white grandfather (the always welcome Shea Whigham) and his well-intentioned but clumsily insensitive wife (Audrey Wasilewski). Knowing that Roki’s deepest desire is to attend the upcoming tribal powwow, Jax sneaks her out of her grandfather’s house in the middle of the night for an impromptu road trip.

As far as the white cops off the rez are concerned, this consensually agreed-upon joyride constitutes an Amber Alert kidnapping far more worthy of investigation than Tawi’s unexplained disappearance. Jax’s half brother JJ (Ryan Begay), a cop on the reservation, is more understanding of the runaways’ plight, though he too harbors doubts about his half sister’s dependability as a full-time guardian. As the cops attempt to close in on the runaway aunt-niece pair, JJ launches his own solo investigation into Tawi’s whereabouts.

Fancy Dance is one of those small-scale indie films that examine social issues through the micro-lens of individual lives, so that the audience gets a sense of the systemic problems that impact the characters’ choices without the director ever having to mount a soapbox: Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Leave No Trace) is a master of this kind of scaled-down social realism. Tremblay and Alise’s tersely written script touches on economic inequality, the link between poverty and addiction, and the institutional racism of the foster care system, without ever naming these issues directly. It’s easy to see why Gladstone spent so much of her awards-season push for Killers of the Flower Moon stumping instead for this underdog film, which sat without a distributor for more than a year after its much-lauded Sundance premiere until Apple picked it up. (The movie opened in a small theatrical release last week and premieres on Apple TV+ this Friday.)

As played by the ever more extraordinary Gladstone in a darker mode than the taciturn heroine who earned the actor her first Best Actress nomination, Jax is a relatable but far from flawless protagonist. She can be brusque, secretive (especially, and understandably, about her semi-closeted queerness), and impulsively self-sabotaging, and she’s not above lying to Roki about the danger their escape from the law has placed them in, even if the deceptions are generally in the interest of protecting her. No one in Fancy Dance, not even the naïve Roki, behaves irreproachably, but Tremblay never judges her characters for their often dubious choices. Even Roki’s white grandparents, oblivious to the way their privilege aligns them with the very forces that are endangering their Indigenous relatives’ way of life, come off not as villains but as f*ckless would-be Samaritans caught up in in a fundamentally damaged system of economic and racial exploitation.

The last 15 or 20 minutes of Fancy Dance, while suspenseful, unfold in too much of a rush for every plotline, especially the one involving Tawi’s disappearance, to resolve as fully as one might wish. But the final scene, in which aunt and niece arrive at the powwow just as the annual mother-daughter ritual dance is beginning, leaves the movie suspended in a delicately ambiguous place, somewhere between the utopian ideal of community that Roki has been craving since the movie began and the much grimmer social reality that she and her aunt, as Native American women, have just encountered on their road trip and must contend with again once the fancy dance is over. For those few moments, though, the niece and her aunt twirl and kick in unison, together, hopeful, and free.