Lily Gladstone’s Apple TV movie shows she’s no one-hit wonder.

Part road movie, part coming-of-age story and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy dance marks the film debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation dogsThe screenplay, written by Tremblay and Miciana Alise, bears some resemblance to this acclaimed series, in that both feature the lives and aspirations of one or more Native American teenagers living on a reservation in Oklahoma: Dog reservation was set in the Muscogee Nation, while Fancy dance takes place primarily in and around the lands of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation, with some dialogue in the Cayuga language. But the extrajudicial shenanigans of the children on the reservation take on a more tragic dimension in fancy dancea film set against the disturbing backdrop of a national epidemic of missing and murdered indigenous women.

When her sister Tawi (Hauli Sioux Gray) suddenly disappears, Jax Goodiron (Lily Gladstone) finds herself responsible for Tawi’s 13-year-old daughter, Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson). Jax is a loyal sister and loving aunt, but she’s also a fiercely independent and sometimes off-putting loner who makes a living from side hustles and, when economic times are tough, sells drugs for a local crime lord. Jax has already served time in prison for this and other petty crimes‍—which means that when a Child Protective Services investigator arrives to assess Roki’s living situation, they have a legally sound, if flimsy, pretext to remove the child from her home that same day and place her in the care of her white grandfather (the always welcome Shea Whigham) and his well-meaning but awkwardly insensitive wife (Audrey Wasilewski). Knowing that Roki’s deepest desire is to attend the next tribal powwow, Jax sneaks her out of her grandfather’s house in the middle of the night for an impromptu road trip.

To the white cops on the reservation, the consensual spree is a far more worthy Amber Alert kidnapping than Tawi’s unexplained disappearance. Jax’s half-brother, JJ (Ryan Begay), a cop on the reservation, is more sympathetic to the runaways’ plight, though he too has doubts about his half-sister’s reliability as a full-time guardian. As the cops try to close in on the runaway aunt-niece, JJ launches his own solo investigation into Tawi’s fate.

Fancy dance is one of those small-scale independent films that examines social issues through the micro-lens of individual lives, so that the audience gets a sense of the systemic issues that affect the characters’ choices without the director ever needing to set up a soapbox: Debra Granik (The winter bone, Leaves no trace) is a master of this kind of small-scale social realism. Tremblay and Alise’s terse screenplay addresses economic inequality, the link between poverty and drug addiction, and the institutional racism of the foster care system, without ever naming these problems directly. It’s easy to see why Gladstone devoted so much of his awards campaign to Flower Moon Killers The producers instead campaigned for the outsider film, which sat without a distributor for more than a year after its Sundance premiere until Apple picked it up. (The film opened in limited theaters last week and will be streaming on Apple TV+ this Friday.)

Played by the ever more extraordinary Gladstone in a darker mode than the taciturn heroine who earned the actor his first Best Actress nomination, Jax is a relatable but far from perfect protagonist. She can be brusque, secretive (especially, understandably, about her semi-closeted homosexuality), and impulsively self-sabotaging, and she has no qualms about lying to Roki about how dangerous their escape from the law is. placed them, even though the deceptions are usually in the interest of protecting her. Nobody in Fancy danceEven the naïve Roki isn’t entirely blameless, but Tremblay never judges his characters for their often questionable choices. Even Roki’s white grandparents, oblivious to how their privilege aligns them with the very forces that endanger their Indigenous parents’ way of life, come across not as villains but as irresponsible would-be Samaritans caught in a fundamentally broken economic system and racial exploitation.

The last 15 or 20 minutes of fancy dancewhile suspenseful, moves too quickly for each plotline, especially the one involving Tawi’s disappearance, to be resolved as thoroughly as one might hope. But the final scene, in which the aunt and niece arrive at the powwow just as the annual mother-daughter ritual dance begins, leaves the film hanging in a delicately ambiguous place, somewhere between the utopian ideal of community that Roki has been dreaming of since the film began and the much darker social reality that she and her aunt, as Native American women, have just encountered on their road trip and must face again once the fancy dance is over. For those few moments, however, the niece and her aunt twirl and kick in unison, together, full of hope and free.