事实与虚构的触摸组合使”The Unknown Country” one beautiful road trip.

Filmed over a number of years, this first narrative feature from documentarian Morrisa Maltz takes us on a wintry journey through South Dakota to hot times in Texas, introducing us to real people well worth meeting along the way.

The story here, though, belongs to a character named Tana, a young Sioux woman on an unclear but quietly urgent search for something.

Tana is played by Lily Gladstone, whose evocative stillness you may recall from her Kristen Stewart-obsessed role in “Certain Women.” She’ll be the female lead in Martin Scorsese’s upcoming “Killers of the Flower Moon,” but “The Unknown Country” is no doubt a very different look at Native American life.

Tana has spent the last few years caring for her grandmother in Minneapolis. The old woman’s death coincides with an invitation to attend a cousin’s wedding near the Pine Ridge Reservation. So, on one frigid night, Tana jumps into Grandma’s white Cadillac, takes the handicap placard off the rearview mirror and heads west, looking at the snow-covered plains through a cracked windshield.

Her soon-to-be-married cousin is Lainey Bearkiller, a real person playing essentially herself, as do some of her friends and relatives in the film. She met Maltz years before Gladstone joined the project, and with the actress and director worked on the script.

Gladstone as Tana fits right in with the affectionate Bearkiller family; Tana is a slightly estranged but welcome guest, detached from the culture the group incorporates into lives that include happy tavern gatherings and watching “Friends” on a living room flat-screen. Lainey actually married her now-husband Devin Shangreaux for a scene in the film, a low-key tribal ceremony set in an elaborate wooden church.

Tana spends much of the movie on the road with only the cacophony of talk radio to keep her company. This is where Gladstone’s subtle magnetism becomes crucial. We’re not sure what’s going on in Tana’s head for the longest time. She wants to get in touch with her roots a little, but isn’t interested in staying in Lakota country. Strange men make her nervous, but that might just be the necessary wariness of a woman traveling alone. There’s sobbing in a blue motel room; grief over her grandma, obviously, but longing for something else that’s missing?

Don’t write Tana off as glum — or Gladstone as too internalized an actor — though. She and the movie blossom into a whole different vibe when the traveler stops over in a suddenly sweltering Dallas. She meets a gaggle of partyers in a beer garden, among them Isaac (“Quantum Leap” star Raymond Lee). Having found a sterling drinking buddy for the night, Tana’s winning personality suddenly busts out. It’s a credit to Gladstone that she somehow keeps the character’s charming side consistent with the earlier, self-contained version.

Texas may provide contrast to the Midwest’s frozen flatness, but both regions supply natural beauty that’s awesome to behold. Cinematographer Andrew Hajek fills vast, foreboding emptiness with a primal majesty that feels reassuringly eternal (yes, we glimpse a buffalo herd). Expressive swaths of neon — motel signs, gas station mini-marts — remind us that man’s commercial grasp reaches everywhere, however tentatively.

Life may be scattered far and wide around here, but Maltz’s interviews with people Tana encounters speak to its richness and diversity. There’s the Deadwood waitress Pam Richter, who saw to it that everyone felt at home at the Hickock House diner for 40 years (COVID took her in 2020). Dale Leander Toller found the man of his dreams, literally, at the gas station he manages in nearby Spearfish, S.D. Teresa Boyd operates one of the last western dance halls in suburban Dallas, where 91-year-old Flo Perrin has come to shake it every Friday for half a century.

If you’re detecting similarities between “Unknown Country” and “Nomadland,” yeah, they’re there. But while that Oscar-winning movie felt like an elegy to Americans and an America lost, Maltz’s work is about finding small, great things we’d likely overlook — if we knew where to go looking for them at all.

Correction:The original version of this review misstated the main character’s name. Played by Lily Gladstone, the character ’s name is Tana.

Bob Strauss is a freelance writer.