Every road movie is really more about the journey than the destination. While driving, road trips bring out our sense of adventure and even existential longing, with movies like “Easy Rider” and “Badlands” reflecting these qualities, even if elements of other genres merge at times with the road picture. 

The new movie “The Unknown Country” could be defined as a road movie, yet it’s also much more: an intricate visual and audio tone poem of the American landscape, and a real-life portrait of working class lives. Director Morrisa Maltz developed the idea over several years as she spent hours driving alone in the Midwest. After filming some of the people she encountered, she later crafted a fictional story of a young Native American woman on a road trip after the death of her grandmother, which fuses with the movie’s more poetic and documentary aspects to create something unique and graceful.

Lily Gladstone, soon to be seen in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” plays Tana, who had been an in-home care nurse for her ailing grandmother for several years. Tana receives an invitation to a distant cousin’s wedding and, despite still grieving the loss of her grandmother, decides to make the more than 600-mile drive to Spearfish, South Dakota, from Minneapolis. After the wedding, she heads to Texas to see a vista immortalized in a treasured photo of her grandmother.

That’s really the plot in a nutshell, and while it can’t be said to be riveting exactly, the movie is never less than intriguing. Much of its hold stems from Andrew Hajek’s cinematography, with its sweeping views of majestic landscapes — there are several shots using drones — and intimate close-ups of details like a cracked windscreen. There are also close-ups of Lily Gladstone’s beautiful, equable face and those of the several real-life people Tana meets on her journey. Most are in the service industry, such as a gas station manager, Dale Leander Toller, and a waitress, Pam Richter, who died from coronavirus in 2020. Employing voiceover narration, Ms. Maltz gives these hard-working people a chance to speak about their lives in vignettes that dot the movie’s trajectory. Much like with “Nomadland,” which featured actual nomads, these scenes never feel condescending. They imbue the movie with a positive energy.

The cousin whom Tana is visiting is also a real-life person: Lainey Bearkiller Shangreaux. A member of the Oglala Lakota tribe, Mrs. Shangreaux contributed quite a bit to the development of the movie’s story. She even invited Ms. Maltz to film her wedding to Devin Shangreaux, and convinced other family members to be in the film. 

When Tana arrives at Spearfish, her first few scenes with Lainey and other friends and family are almost too naturalistic and laconic, betraying a tension that could be said to arise from Tana’s long absence and the apparent economic pressures portrayed. Devin works two jobs to make ends meet, and Tana’s grandmother’s brother, who lives on the reservation and not in the city, talks about the housing crisis.

While the filmmakers don’t focus on these issues, it’s clear they are concerned about the state of the country, particularly during an extended sequence in which Tana is driving to Texas and a cacophony of talk radio soundbites paints a bleak aural picture of America. The sound editing during this scene and others is masterful, and, along with the evocative roadside imagery of neon signs and amorphous mounds of snow, creates a menacing mood at times. 

This mood is matched whenever Tana comes across unfamiliar men on her travels. Without being explicit about it, Ms. Maltz makes us understand that Tana has experienced some sort of trauma related to a man. The ominous music during these scenes aside, Ms. Gladstone’s face says it all.

Once Tana reaches Dallas, she finally fully relaxes when she goes to a bar and meets some locals. A potential romance is hinted at with a young guy named Isaac (Raymond Lee), but after a night of dancing and convivial conversation, the character continues on to Big Bend National Park in southwestern Texas. 

From here, the movie becomes more elliptical and even fantastical, with Tana walking through the hot Texan terrain barefoot, alone, and with no water. As the “The Unknown Country” ends, much is unexplained but the filmmakers seem to be saying that the journey is everything, with destinations and answers forever changing. Tana’s emotional terrain goes largely unexplored, yet the sense of its immensity lingers.