Nebraska

Director: Alexander Payne

2013 / 115min / DCP

Anchored by a career-high performance by Bruce Dern, Payne’s bleakly funny monochrome road movie stars Dern as Woody Grant, an ornery old barfly from Montana who’s convinced by a mail scam that a million dollar sweepstakes prize is waiting for him in Lincoln, Nebraska, recruiting estranged son Will Forte to drive him across the Great Plains to collect his “winnings.” As their journey across state lines becomes a trip through Woody’s disappointing life, Nebraska achieves a bittersweet beauty, developing into something akin to a working-class flyover country equivalent of Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.