On demand: "Fancy Dance"

She broke the world's hearts in Certain Women and Killers of the Flower Moon; now here's what Lily Gladstone did next. Fancy Dance is an old-school regional indie - picked up by Apple after a successful launch at last year's Sundance - which takes us somewhere we've likely never been so as to tell us a story that could only be told this well by folks with close ties to the blue-collar Cayugan community it describes. Erica Tremblay's film is organised around an absence: with her mother missing, wide-eyed 13-year-old Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) is being dragged up by her boozy, criminally inclined aunt Jax (Gladstone). Early scenes establish community concerns: the whereabouts of the missing woman, primarily, but also the residents' simmering resentment at being abandoned by the powers-that-be. With the oil that lubed Flower Moon's narrative having long been successfully tapped and piped out - bringing scant financial benefits even to those Cayugans who work the pumps - these few square miles of Oklahoman flatland have been left to fall into barely managed decline. Yet Tremblay and co-writer Miciana Alise are also keenly alert to those tensions within this one misshapen household. For one, we note how Jax hasn't been entirely honest with her young charge, who retains hopes of dancing with her mother at the annual powwow (still a thing, apparently, only now with admission fees and refreshment trucks); we also discern how alienated Jax is from her people, most notably her father Frank (Shea Whigham), who's white, comfortably appointed, living off-reservation with his new wife and the man to whom the authorities turn when they tardily rehouse Roki, leaving Jax with nothing. Everything's broken; everyone's left fighting over the pieces. Yet one look at Gladstone's form, at the forearms suddenly loosed from period dress, and we know immediately that Jax is up for the scrap that ensues.

The role is a gift not just for the actress, but for all those who felt she wasn't allowed to be as proactive as she could have been in the Scorsese film. Jax is no easy martyr or mark; in the course of Fancy Dance, she will assume the roles of undercover PI, butch lover to a local stripper, and fugitive in the eyes of the law. Given all that, it's almost no surprise she hasn't time to be the ambassador her community would like, nor the stabilising presence Roki sorely needs. Yet in Gladstone's scarcely suppressed frustration, it's possible to infer the many hardships Jax's generation of natives have had to endure, and she's well-matched with Deroy-Olson, who suggests a newly curious mind, cognisant of far more than she lets on. The film Tremblay and Alise construct around this pair can seem foursquare and prosaic; one reason Apple must have been drawn here is that it tessellates easily with that glut of missing-woman dramas that have become a feature of streaming television. (Among them, the recent Under the Bridge, starring Gladstone herself: our creatives have apparently decided en masse that one way to right the representational wrongs of the past is to stage and perform hunts for that which went AWOL in the first place.) Fancy Dance is at its strongest and most distinctive on the reservation, where Tremblay and Alise paint a vivid, Winter's Bone-like picture of a community collapsing into mistrust. Once our girls go on the lam, sourcing Chekhov's handgun in a department store changing room, it starts to feel rather more Sundance-labbed - although, even here, there haven't been all that many manhunts that have paused so fleeing parties can pick up sanitary towels. That's one of several smart writing choices that gently refine our relationships with these characters. The title, for starters, refers both to the climactic powwow and the gentrifying ballet classes Roki's guardians invest in for her; it's also grimly telling that Jax's breakaway with the girl attracts more attention from the cops than the mystery of the missing mother. The movies themselves feel a little broken and worn down right now: there would be worse recovery strategies than revisiting semi-familiar narratives in underfilmed locales with deft new shifts in emphasis.

Fancy Dance is available to stream on Apple TV+ from tomorrow.