While watching Alexander Payne’s latest film, Nebraska, and seeing a few fleeting seconds of downtown Lincoln on the big screen in beautiful black and white, I felt proud to be a Nebraskan.

Payne’s films, at least here in Nebraska, are more than just films. They are an entity that bring people together who normally might not be, and brings them to places where they normally would not find themselves (i.e. Film Streams). The other people in the theatre with me didn’t feel like strangers, but rather a small, tight-knit community of people who came together to see a state so near and dear to them through the eyes of arguably it’s most famous native (sorry Marlon Brando, you never grew up here).

Nebraska tells the story of father and son Woody and David Grant (played by Bruce Dern and Will Forte respectively) trekking from their residence in Billings, Montana all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska in order to collect one million dollars that Woody claims he has won via a letter in the mail.

While the film is bookended by both Billings and Lincoln, the bulk of the film takes place in the fictitious town of Hawthorne, Nebraska, the town where Woody grew up in. Throughout their stay in Hawthorne, David gets to see bits and pieces of his father’s past slowly unravel right before his very eyes. Old lovers, friends, and enemies all come out from the woodwork to tell various anecdotes about his father, who is so forgetful in his old age that he barely says more than four words at a time throughout the entire film.

Dern’s performance is pure deadpan gold. Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, Woody’s wife, Kate Grant (played by June Squibb), is a thrill ride of a woman filled with heinous and uproarious comments and observations. For instance, at one point in the movie, she pulls up her skirt and flashes the grave of one of her former flings, shouting out, “See what you could have had, Keith, if you hadn’t talked about wheat all the time?”. If that doesn’t tell you the kind of women she is I don’t know what would.

Former SNL cast member Forte’s performance goes appreciated, although it isn’t anything too compelling or complex. He plays a good Robin to Dern’s Batman…if Batman was old and geriatric and Robin was an audio equipment salesman.

Yet, despite this film’s possibility to be just as boring as the more rural areas of the Midwest, Payne is able to avoid any pitfalls and instead uses the farm-filled landscapes and long, wide roads to create a picture that is just as bleakly gorgeous and rough around the edges as Woody’s past.

8/10