You’ve got to see ‘Nebraska’

It’s one of the best movies of the year, and here’s why.

“Nebraska,” directed by Alexander Payne (“The Descendants”), feels like coming home. Among all the chaos within and around the universe, it seems to say there will always be the father and the son, driving along a wide, open road, side by side watching the asphalt tip into the horizon.

Payne shrinks our universe to include only these two and the scruff that small town America offers, but the scenes are familiar to any viewer, tinged with nostalgia the way a fresh apple pie is set on a windowsill.

Woody Grant (Bruce Dern, “Django Unchained”), a cantankerous alcoholic, receives a letter claiming he’s the million-dollar winner of Mega Sweepstakes Marketing. He wrangles his sighing and head-shaking son David (Will Forte, “Life of Crime”) into a Montana-Nebraska road trip to collect his winnings, Don Quixote-style.

It’s a journey to top off a life. There’s a scene, right before the trip, where we see Woody lying in a flea-bitten couch, every line on his face visible in the film’s monochrome lensing. He almost becomes the couch with the way he’s sunk into it, and we realize this is a man who needs purpose as his life slowly curtains.

The trip is beautifully shot in black and white. Their car rattles along the infinity vistas of the Midwest — plains stretching left and right and flat tongues of roads guiding the way — before making a pit stop in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne.

There, word quickly spreads of his new affluence. He’s the man of the hour. A little boy squeaks by on a bike to take his picture for the local paper. Every Hawthorne citizen goes out of his way to shake his hand, ask how he’s been and congratulate him.

“What are you going to buy with that mill-yun dollars, Woody?”

“A new truck,” he replies each time with a perpetual frown.

Several family members and so-called friends also come out of the woodwork for their share of the money. The sleazy mooching isn’t much of a plot, but it bares the heart of small town America, those places that have been reduced to pit stops and memory.

These are people descending into their proverbial couch, stagnant and dusty. To them, Woody represents what’s beyond the horizon. They elevate him to a beacon of hope. His dream becomes their dream.

Toward the end, Woody reveals his ultimate motive. With the same vaguely offended tone he uses throughout the movie, at first comical and later tragic, he says to his son David, “I wanted to leave something for you boys.”

He’s been a piss-poor drunk of a father, and his son, reflecting on the fact, only chauffeurs him to Nebraska to humor his obstinate will. No one quite takes Woody seriously — not even the audience. Once he springs this confession upon David, however, the truck comes into significance. Out of anything he could buy for himself, he only asks for a truck, a way to move on his own. The rest of the lottery money, in a feeble attempt to atone, is for his boys.

Dern’s acting is heartbreaking. At once frail and exasperating, he creates a character who puts all his faith into righting his path before it runs out. By the end of the movie, the audience, too, has put all their faith into the character.

We’re with Woody and David in the car as they pull away from Hawthorne, praying at the edge of our seats for those sweepstakes to be genuine. “Nebraska” is an ode to the windmill dream.