Later she and Linda May sit back on their folding chairs, sheet masks on their faces, a beauty salon of their own out in the desert. There she finds a welcoming community, resilient, rootless, all seizing the day.

Linda May, another greying nomad and one of Fern’s friends and co-workers at Amazon’s CamperForce, a brigade of RV-dwelling, elderly seasonal staff (free parking provided), encourages Fern to come to the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous in Quartzsite, Arizona, led by white-bearded guru Bob Wells, a master of the arts of on-the-road survival. She gives away all her belongings and heads off to Alaska, a copy of Final Exit in hand. Of course, in Nomadland the difference is that Zhao uses stars - Frances McDormand (famously private and determinedly unglamorous, she’s hardly a typical Hollywood icon, which makes her ideal for inhabiting the role) and David Strathairn as the mild-mannered Dave with a crush on Fern – alongside the non-professional, real-life van dwellers playing themselves, such as 75-year-old Swankie, who gives Fern a lecture about having no spare tyre and reveals that she has terminal cancer.

This is a growing demographic, documented by Jessica Bruder in her book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century, which was optioned in 2019 by Frances McDormand and producer Peter Spears and on which the film is loosely based, though without Bruder’s hard-hitting observations about the gig economy. In those films, her focus was on the Lakota Sioux of the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in Nomadland, using the same director of photography, her partner Joshua James Richards, it’s on the itinerant work force made up of senior citizens who, since the financial crash, can’t afford to retire. Chloé Zhao’s hypnotically beautiful, multi-award-winning third feature builds on the same docu-fiction MO as her extraordinary The Rider (2017) and Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015) where she used non-professional actors playing versions of themselves and built a script around their life stories.

Nomadland book review