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

It’s easy to see why the actor spent so much of awards season campaigning for this movie instead.

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. 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. 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 feckless would-be Samaritans caught up in in a fundamentally damaged system of economic and racial exploitation.

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