The Fall’s Best Movies Are About American Soul-Searching

Read: David Byrne’s joyful and uncomfortable reinvention of the rock concert

This tension is at the heart of American Utopia, as is Byrne’s distress over our disconnected modern world. Throughout the show, he champions the joys of collaboration and communality. At one point, he notes that most of the performers (including himself) are immigrants. At another, he decries America’s low voting numbers and informs the audience members that they can register to vote on-site once the concert is over. The film builds to a cover of Janelle Monáe’s protest song “Hell You Talmbout,” during which performers chant the names of Black people killed by police, including Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland; Lee’s camera cuts away from the theater and shows the victims’ loved ones holding up photographs of those they lost.

Through each beautifully choreographed song, Byrne demonstrates the thrill of watching people perform in sync. But he tempers that glee with stark reminders of how much remains broken outside of his theatrical space, and how much work remains to be done—by others and by himself. The film’s premiere came shortly after Byrne apologized on Twitter for a newly resurfaced clip of him appearing in blackface in a 1984 video: “Like I say at the end of our Broadway show ‘American Utopia,’ ‘I need to change too”… and I believe I have changed since then.” In an interview with Variety, he addressed the responsibility he has as an artist talking about racial justice to own up to his mistakes.“If I’m going to talk about this stuff, I can’t talk about giving advice to other people if I can’t do it myself,” Byrne said.

Along with American Utopia, the most highly anticipated premiere at TIFF was Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, which won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and will be released on December 4. Zhao’s previous movie, the heart-wrenching modern Western The Rider, was one of the best films of 2018 and made enough of a splash to get her a gig making a giant blockbuster for Marvel (The Eternals, due out next year). In between those projects, she quietly made Nomadland, working with its star, Frances McDormand, to adapt a nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder about older transient workers displaced by the 2008 recession and living in cars. The film is a worthy exploration of the lost American dream, focusing on communities laid to waste by an economic crisis the country has already begun to forget.

Read: ‘The Rider’ was one of the best films of 2018

Nomadland was filmed with a tiny crew that moved across seven states for four months and mostly features nonactors appearing as themselves. McDormand plays Fern, a woman still mourning the Nevada company town she left behind after its Sheetrock factory closed and her husband died. Zhao’s film is a requiem for Fern’s former way of life and a celebration of the new existence she’s found, living in her van and moving from job to job as the seasons change. The open road has long been a mythic environment for cinema, and Nomadland captures many staggering, romantic vistas on Fern’s journey. But Zhao also visits mundane locales—parking lots, Laundromats, an Amazon packaging factory where Fern picks up shifts at Christmas. In the classic American Western, endless possibility always lies ahead; Nomadland is a modest yet powerful portrayal of Fern’s determined effort to cling to the only thing she has left: her independence.

While Nomadland renders the inherent contradictions of America visually, Regina King’s directorial debut, One Night in Miami, does so in words. King’s film, which will be released by Amazon later this year, imagines a fictional meeting between historical heavyweights: Sam Cooke (played by Leslie Odom Jr.), Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), before he was known as Muhammad Ali. Based on Kemp Powers’s play of the same name, the film is set after Clay’s first victory over Sonny Liston, in 1964, when a celebratory hangout turns into a debate over the best way to build a better America.