If you're trying to decide whether you should see Alexander Payne's new movie Nebraska, you should read David Schmader's review, which is exactly right. I have a few ideas about the movie that I wanted to work out here, but if you only read one review of Nebraska, absolutely make it Schmader's. But if you want to read two reviews of Nebraska, we should talk.

It seems as though Payne's films are all obsessed, in one way or another, with the void, with nothingness. I forget which review I read of About Schmidt that made a big production of pointing out that Jack Nicholson's Schmidt finds his dead wife next to a vacuum, but that observation opened up a whole world for me. In fact, most of Payne's movies have to do with the void. (Most of those voids, troublingly, are embodied by women. The absence of a woman filling the space where a woman once was drives the plot of The Descendants, Sideways, and About Schmidt. Election was about Tracy Flick's moral void. Citizen Ruth took place in the gaping chasm between pro-life and pro-choice.)

Nebraska, with its beautiful, bleak black and white cinematography, is set entirely in the vacuum that Payne has been flirting with for his whole career. With its wide shots of grassless, rockless flat landscapes stretching to bland horizons, you get the sense that if Nebraska was shot in color, there wouldn't be much of a difference. The land itself doesn't care about anyone. It was there before the movie started. It watched all the characters in the movie grow up. It'll be there after they die. It never noticed they were there.

It's interesting that Payne had to jump, head-first, into the emptiness that his characters have been so afraid to address in order to make a movie that fully respects the humanity of its characters. Payne always seems to have a certain distance from his characters; he reserves the right to laugh at them even as he feels for them. (Think of George Clooney's ridiculous trot from one house to another in The Descendants, with Payne following every agonizing step. It feels like a humiliation to not cut away from Clooney as he flip-flops awkwardly down the street. And Paul Giamatti barely left Sideways with a shred of dignity intact.) But Nebraska is a movie that falls in love with its characters, even as it slowly uncovers all the contradictions and cruelties that makes them who they are. In the middle of all that nothingness, Payne realizes that their dignity, their humanity, is all they have. Some characters come out of Nebraska looking better than others—man, I wish Payne had rounded out June Squibb's wife and mother a bit more, made her a little less shrill, because she's certainly not helping his iffy record with female characters—but every one of them has a heart. Sometimes, the beating of those hearts is the only sound you can hear, in the vacuum of Nebraska.