In Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Lily Gladstone made a deep impression with her stillness and controlled presence. This is different; in a fiction-feature debut from Native American documentary-maker Erica Tremblay, Gladstone’s performance is looser, more open, less reserved. Simply put: she does more acting, and gives strength and substance to a dense, knotty family drama which though maybe anticlimactic in the final act – and too reliant on a handgun plot-point – is fluent and heartfelt.
Gladstone plays Jax, living on Oklahoma’s Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation, trying to put behind her a life of dealing drugs but still on the fringes of crime. She has been looking after her teen niece Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson), since the disappearance of Roki’s mother Tawi, but Roki fervently believes that Tawi will reappear for the annual powwow at which they once the stole the show with their mother-daughter dance. Things are even more complicated by the fact that Jax’s father is white; this is Frank (Shea Whigham) who, since the death of Jax’s mother, has remarried Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski), a white woman.
