The setting of this movie at the start is present day Montana  where Woody Grant played by Bruce Dern is starting a walk down the highway towards Lincoln Nebraska to pick up his expected winnings of 1 million dollars which is from a flyer in the mail. Might there be fine print to this?

He doesn't trust the mail with this type of dough, and hence the journey, which is a false start at the beginning, with the cops picking him up by the highway.

Is he losing it a bit, and that could be one question, as his health might be an issue now or in the near future due to apparent long time excessive drinking where he seems to have overdone that.

He wife Kate displays the most moxie of anyone in the movie and under the veneer of this seems to know more about what is going on that most others.

Two sons are around in the neighborhood, one is unsympathetic with Woody but the other son,  Dave is trying to help him out and agrees eventually to take him to Nebraska himself, to the city of Lincoln to see what the story is on this supposed one million dollar payoff.

Dave is a fairy sharp cookie, but seems caught with the drab surroundings highlighted by more so vacant landscapes, and the black and white that the movie is shot in.

His girlfriend of two years has moved out, and she doesn't exactly look to be a sizzling beauty or possessing of any sort of dynamic push.

He seems like he is more so getting caught in the drift of things, with this girl and someplace else in the world like Rio or Paris, he could be the dashing guy with the dashing lady.

Ultimately, this movie is almost like science fiction and reminds a bit of the movie the Road with Robert Duvall which presented a post apocalyptic landscape with the infrastructure still standing and yet not operational.

And that just sums up about every character in this movie, they are not really operational in terms of any dynamic interest in the outer world and seemed caught in a schism of time and place where nothing much seems to happen and they can't generate excitement and passion on their own.

Drone like conversation includes things like what cars has someone been driving over the years yet they don't even know the difference between a Japanese and Korean make, indicative of their lack of awareness of the big wide world somewhere out there.

Things going back as much as 4 decades, such as a hijacked generator in the case of Woody himself, or his old friends conjuring up supposed debts to be repaid decades later, are all the more indicators that these people seemed to be playing out the string rather early in that events going on 30 plus years ago have such prominence in their thinking, andindicating that just about nothing eventful has happened since and on top of that, all the characters seem to be in the mode of " life unexamined", except for Kate in her own misguided colorful way.

Dave, still, has a chance not to fall prey, but for most of the characters, this landscape and situ has melded and nothing is going to arise from the ashes of this Phoenix.

There are all sorts of versions of this, an example might be the super high school quarterback who is talking about his great games decades later, in the meantime he has just hung out and drank beers since and that athlete is long lost and the games long over as well as all attendees at the games might have moved on, maybe.

It might be that Woody is a little bit of a post war reactionary that cocooned a bit too much due to that rough experience, and all passionate potential was thwarted that way in the subsequent decompression.

Or did his post war surroundings help, is this all a matter of place or is it something else?

But is he had great potential, nothing much is visible for him now, or in most of the characters in the movie, hey his friend is a great Karaoke singer though.

His son Dave could have faint rays of hope, but he doesn't seem to be able to shine them through for Woody and the arch for a hopeful happy ending has to be in the language that these people speak, which is not exactly exciting and thrilling.

There are all sorts of contra utopian visions of people lacking  personal electricity and this is certainly one version of that, done quite well, and should this movie should put on the warming lights for others who might be walking down this slow, not much happening road for too long and to far.