‘Fancy Dance’ Review: Lily Gladstone in Satisfying Indie Drama That Breaks Barriers

Like many an American independent film that made a splash at Sundance or SXSW, Fancy Dance is a satisfying drama that breaks barriers—even if it doesn’t do much to break the mold. It oscillates between moving and manufactured, but the movie’s honest portrayal of life on a tribal reservation and a powerful performance by Lily Gladstone keep things grounded.

Fancy Dance centers around an extended family in crisis, as a Cayuga woman named Tawi joins the unfortunate ranks of missing and murdered Indigenous women. She hasn’t been seen for two weeks, and while her sister Jax (Gladstone) knows enough about the world they live in to be prepared for the worst, Tawi’s 13-year-old daughter Roki (Isabel Deroy-Olson) is naive enough to believe that she and her mom will reunite at an upcoming powwow. Jax takes Roki in, lying to her niece about when she’ll see her mother all while taking on the search herself, but things get bad when Child Protective Services come in. They declare Jax an unfit guardian, given her murky criminal past, and force Roki to stay with Jax and Tawi’s white father Frank (Shea Whigham) off of the reservation. This development doesn’t last long, though, as Jax essentially kidnaps a willing Roki for a roadtrip to find Tawi and clear up this whole custody issue.

The film doesn’t always thread the needle of family drama, road movie, and quasi-crime thriller, but it’s compelling enough in its 90-minute run time. The plot has the tendency to escalate a bit wildly for such a small movie, leaving climactic moments to feel jarring and almost unbelievable. The in-between bits are where the story really shines and becomes poignant, whether that’s Roki’s step-grandmother Nancy (Audrey Wasilewski) trying to replace her powwow dancing with ballet or when Roki practices dancing in her mother’s fringed shawl and the platform lucite heels Tawi wears at the reservation’s strip club.

Perhaps the most heartwarming small moment comes when Roki gets her first period while she and Jax are on the run. It makes for a few beautiful beats, some deeply relatable and others quite culturally specific. So many movies shy away from menstruation or treat it as something fearsome, and that makes Fancy Dance’s frank presentation of it very welcome. Roki gets excited but a bit embarrassed over the blood, Jax steps in to lead an improvised version of a ritual welcoming her into a new stage of girlhood—a sweet and incredibly real sequence.

Roki’s gradual maturing is thus a major part of Fancy Dance, but the film can’t quite nail down Roki’s youth and what that means for her in these dire circumstances. She sometimes comes across as too naive. Her belief that her mother will show up despite being missing for weeks is unwavering, and it’s hard to believe her failure to grasp the situation once Frank and Nancy get the authorities involved to track her down. One of the film’s most exasperating choices when Roki casually pickpockets a dainty little handgun from a woman’s purse (you don’t need to be Chekhov to know that it will go off). There are moments when the character feels artificial.

That said, there’s nothing false about Gladstone’s Jax. The Oscar-nominated actress gives you chills from her facial expressions alone; while she tries to be strong and stoic in the face of family tragedy, Jax’s facade gives way to a painful combination of fear, anger, and grief. She’s one woman against a system that views Indigenous people as an afterthought and a bureaucratic burden, and the weight of that fight hangs heavy in every choice that Gladstone makes.

On that note, it would be remiss to not mention the significance of Fancy Dance’s cultural presentation and preservation. The movie contains both English and Cayuga dialogue, with the latter considered a critically endangered language. There’s a power in the permanence of film, so putting the Cayuga language on camera is one of the strongest statements on display here. The movie also has plenty to say about how overlooked Indigenous issues are, with the red tape headache of local versus federal versus tribal jurisdiction stopping much of the community’s search for Tawi in its tracks. The film lays bare many of the problems found in life on the reservation, and it’s clear how few solutions are made available. As such, Fancy Dance is a socially, culturally important movie; that and Lily Gladstone’s moving performance make up for its far-from-perfect plotting.