Fancy Dance • Salt Lake Magazine

The emotional narrative of Erica Tremblay Elegant dance its baroque surface is as simple as it is complex. Roki (Isabel Delroy-Olson), a teenager living on the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation in Oklahoma, has been close to her aunt Jax since her mother, Jax’s sister Tawi, went missing. They’re both worried, but Jax (Lily Gladstone) is a master of dissimulation. It’s her superpower. So she seems calm, unfazed as she assures Roki that yes, Tawi will be home in time to dance with her daughter at the next powwow in Oklahoma City. In fact, however, out of Roki’s sight, Jax desperately searches for information on the whereabouts of her sister.

Jax and Tawi’s brother by another father, JJ, is a cop on the reservation, but he’s not much help, crippled in part by federal jurisdiction over missing persons. The sisters’ father, Frank, a white man who has had little contact with his daughters since their mother died and remarried a white woman, might be in a better position to pressure the feds, Jax thinks, but he and his wife Nancy have a relationship plus pressing interest in giving Roki a better life, off the reservation. Meanwhile, the terse and deeply sinister Boo presides over the local pawn shop, the center of a nefarious drug ring that entangles the strip club where Tawi worked and a nearby RV camp filled with ruthless, mostly white miners. .

By the time we have placed ourselves in this dramatic landscape, relatively at the beginning of the film, and more…