The 'indie' candidate for word-of-mouth film of the season

The beauty of truth: hidden gas stations, motels that are not sinister, just vulgar, supermarket parking lots, places of passage... Omaha takes place in locations where no one shoots films because they don't seem to deserve it. Cole Webley, in his debut, thinks the opposite: that cinematic truth beats precisely there, on the margins. That there is also beauty and expressiveness in some non-places. Especially if they serve to explain, as if it were a landscape with emotional and psychological temperature, a road movie about a father and his two impoverished sons (the film takes place during the 2008 crisis) who, after a family tragedy that is never fully explained, wander the back roads of Nebraska.

The truth of beauty: in this traveling melodrama with 100% Sundance origin designation, John Magaro, whom some have compared to Dustin Hoffman through that same lost gaze of Kramer vs. Kramer, drives without knowing exactly where or why. Between him and little Molly Belle Wright, they build a fictitious but so naturalized father-daughter relationship that it moves as if they were real father and daughter. Perhaps because it is tender, perhaps because it is tragic. As if they wanted to tell us, but without ever fully verbalizing it, that grief and love are sometimes the same, expressed differently depending on who you have, or no longer have, around you.