Fancy Dance lead Lily Gladstone became the toast of Tinseltown after her performance in Martin Scorsese’s epic drama Killers Of The Flower Moon, which told the true story of the Osage murders of the 1920s, where Indigenous people, including many women, were murdered in a plot to get their land – and the wealth they had accumulated since the discovery of oil on their Oklahoma reservation.

Lily Gladstone played Mollie Kyle, a wealthy Osage woman who becomes the target of a plot masterminded by William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his less-hapless-than-he-seems nephew Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio.) Gladstone played Mollie as fiercely intelligent but quiet; calmly observant and gracefully regal, and even though the audience is aware of the horrors Ernest is inflicting on her family, the two share a quiet, loving chemistry that becomes painful to watch as Mollie becomes sicker and sicker, supposedly due to a family illness. Ernest and the audience know the truth.

One criticism of the film, and likely the reason that Emma Stone won the Academy’s Best Actress for Poor Things over Gladstone, is that the writing in Killers Of The Flower Moon under-served Mollie. Her character quickly begins to shrink away into sickness, becoming wan and non-verbal, and leaving audiences greedy for more of the strong, complex, and fully-rounded character we glimpsed at the start.

These Gladstone fans may be the first ones queuing up to see Fancy Dance, the debut fiction feature from Native American documentary maker Erica Tremblay. Gladstone plays Jax, a former convict back living on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation in Oklahoma. Jax is still on probation after getting caught drug-dealing to white oil rig workers; it is one of the ways to survive in a place where Indigenous people’s land and wealth was stolen (see above summary of Killers Of The Flower Moon).

Lily Gladstone in Fancy Dance

Native women are left with few options to make a living and many end up selling stolen goods and cars, or working in the strip clubs frequented by white workers. It was here that Jax’s sister Tawi worked before she disappeared, leaving behind her 13 year-old daughter Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olsen), who Jaz has been looking after since Tawi went missing.

Gladstone plays Jaz as determined, loving and hardscrabble, sharing a warm ease with Roki, frequently conversing in Cayuga. Jax lies to Roki, telling her that Tawai will be back for the Powwow, determined to preserve some of Roki’s innocence – even though this desire seems to be at odds with the shoplifting and stealing she teaches Roki.

But Jax’s relationship and care for Roki is threatened when Child Protective Services decide that Roki should live with Jax and Tawi’s white father Frank (Shea Whigham) and his new wife Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski) – the first step, Jax believes, in taking Roki away from her community, where she’ll be forced to assimilate into a world of ballet instead of traditional dance, and where feathers are the adornments of white boho girls instead of sacred symbols. Whigham and Wasilewski put in beautiful performances as people clumsily trying to do the right thing, with Whigham’s quiet role imbued with a guilt over his past actions and privilege.

We enter the story when Tai has been missing for a couple of weeks, only seeing her on the Missing posters that Jax keeps spreading around town and in videos of her and Roki dancing at the annual Powwow, where First Nations communities come together to sing, dance, socialise and honour their culture. Tawi’s absence hangs over Fancy Dance – as does the apparent apathy of everyone.

It’s clear that Tawi has gone AWOL before and her erratic behaviour is used as an excuse not to care, but the bigger issue is the frequent disappearance and murder of First Nation women – a systemic issue so frequent that missing and murdered women are acknowledged every year at the Powwow. Jax can’t get law enforcement or the FBI to look into Tawi’s disappearance – but when Jax takes matters into her own hands, the police immediately start searching for her, because they care more about being able to arrest a First Nation woman than saving one.

Isabel Deroy-Olson and Lily Gladstone in Fancy Dance

Throughout Fancy Dance, Gladstone (as Jay) and Deroy-Olsen (as Roki) share a warm, easy chemistry, and we can see the similarities in their characters; their tenderness, spiky defence mechanisms, and constant awareness of how they are surveilled and suspected by white people, which becomes more heightened when they take to the road. Both are fuelled by hope in different ways – Roki’s belief that her mother will reappear at the Powwow, and Jax’s desperate desire for her actions to spur the FBI into finding her sister.

Fancy Dance shines when the small, intimate moments between her two lead characters are interrupted by the uncaring world around them. The film demonstrates unflinchingly how violence, cruelty and systemic racism invade the lives of First Nations people just trying to survive. There is an un-showy portrayal of reservation life that feels influenced by Tremblay’s documentary background, and while the energy can lag, the film’s emotional core and quiet insight into the lived realities of Native women is genuinely engaging throughout.