Instead, Zhao overwhelms us with another myth: an American West whose beauties and possibilities, so iconic and familiar from movies and legends, are sustained, but whose everyday realities have, in the interim, fallen far short of that dream. By the time the movie starts, that’s already the past. There’s no heroic Rumble here for him to reenact, no champion myth that will endure beyond the man himself. The Rider, by contrast, is the story of a hero-champion who’s suffered a devastating brain injury and can no longer ride, just like the real Jandreau. Ali starred as himself the movie builds toward the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a fight which, you may remember, Ali won. It’s eerie for playing somewhat like a funhouse distortion of movies like Muhammad Ali’s The Greatest (1977), which retells and mythologizes the story of the champ’s come-up as an athlete and man after the 1960 Olympics. It dropped all of them into a story somewhat like Jandreau’s own (minus the part where he becomes the star of a breakout festival-circuit movie).

Zhao’s last project, The Rider (2017), starred the retired rodeo rider Brady Jandreau, as well as his immediate family and friends - none of them professional actors all of them members of the Lakota Sioux nation who live on the Pine Ridge Reservation. If you need work to live, and if home is meant to be an anchor, who are you without either? It’s an astonishing thing to think about, particularly in terms of what comes after for the town’s residents. Gypsum shut down its plant in Empire, Nevada, after 88 years.” And with that, Empire was no more.

A zip code can be, as Chloé Zhao’s new film Nomadland puts it in an opening title card, “discontinued.” (The movie begins a one-week qualifying run in virtual cinemas today it goes into wide release next February.) “On January 31, 2011,” it tells us, “due to a reduced demand for sheetrock, U.S. It could also describe the places beyond the gutted downtowns and main streets, areas whose populations hover in the low thousands, or hundreds, or even less - municipalities so diffuse that the eradication of the local identities, traditions, and people anchored to the geography can be literal. This shouldn’t be so hard to imagine it is, in so many ways, the story of America’s once-towering industrial cities. Imagine a place on the map so tied to its industries that when the work disappears, so does the place.

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