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It's a step back towards the right direction after the tone-deaf unwieldiness of The Descendants, but Alexander Payne's Nebraska never reaches the brilliantly black-hearted comic tight-wire showmanship of his earliest efforts like Citizen Ruth and Election. Payne is still occasionally mistaking shrillness for sharpness (it only really finds its footing in its last third, I'd say) and there are a few beats that feel like straight up fumbles. Bruce Dern gives a beautifully low-key performance in the lead though, deftly brushing the lingering crumbs of that frightfully maudlin and obvious Clooney performance right off the screen, and Payne's matured swerve towards humanism pays off here in ways his last film only had coma-fueled fever dreams of doing. How Payne crams so much feeling into the reaction shot of a one-off non-actor is especially wondrous. And the cinematography is beyond the beyond stunning.
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