The rich may, per Hemingway, be different only because they have more money, and thus artists only because they make art, yet both of these situations influence attitudes and behavior in ways that are ready-made for drama. There’s only a bit of wealth in the writer and director Shatara Michelle Ford’s second feature, “Dreams in Nightmares,” but there are many artists, and the resulting film is a passionate and turbulent view of their lives, their inner and outer struggles, and their quest for freedom—both of action and of thought. It’s also a drama of freedom in the civic sense—a dramatic record of practical and emotional effects, on Black queer and trans women and nonbinary people, of the rhetoric and policies that mark American life in the Trump era.
Like Ford’s first feature, “Test Pattern” (2019), in which a woman who is raped confronts the medical and legal systems’ enormous obstacles to care, “Dreams in Nightmares” is a vision of public power in private lives. But what’s new in this film is that, by centering characters who are artists, it also centers their responses, their efforts to record, resist, and give an active, expressive shape to inchoate clamor, fear, and rage. The form of “Dreams in Nightmares” is something of a coalescing mosaic, a tale of thirtysomething college friends whose connections only gradually emerge and whose long-distance reconnections take place only under pressure.
On the day that Zuleka (Denée Benton), called Z, a writer in Los Angeles, loses her job as an adjunct professor of creative writing, her friend Tasha (Sasha Compère), a well-paid corporate consultant in Brooklyn, also loses hers. Together with Tasha’s roommate, an underemployed poet named Lauren (Dezi Bing), they had been planning a trip to the Dominican Republic. That’s now out of the question, and, instead, Z visits her friends in Brooklyn. When conversation turns to a fourth member of the circle—a visual artist named Kel, who has been living in Iowa City and recently went through a breakup there—the friends realize that they haven’t heard from Kel in months. They decide to use their unexpected free time to take a road trip in search of Kel, and set out in Tasha’s car. When they arrive in Iowa City, Kel’s ex, Sabrina (Jasmin Savoy Brown), tells them that Kel left seven months ago, so the friends drive on—first, to Kansas City, where Kel’s parents live, en route to Santa Fe, where Kel may have an artist’s residency.
“Dreams in Nightmares” takes the form of an abstract detective story, in the vein of Michelangelo Antonioni’s key work of cinematic modernism “L’Avventura” (1960). In Antonioni’s film, after a woman disappears during a boating vacation, her partner and her best friend travel around looking for her, while the bond between them tightens and their grip on the threads of certainty loosens. The Italian filmmaker’s great achievement, alongside the stylistic one of his extraordinary images, was to render context present, to show characters whose inner lives are inextricably influenced, even controlled, by social forces and environmental factors, such as politics, media, landscape, and architecture. Ford, even more than Antonioni, renders characters’ social context both intellectually and dramatically explicit by way of extensive, florid, candid, confrontational dialogue. “Dreams in Nightmares”—call it Americantonioni—is one of the most impressive recent movies of the word. The talk doesn’t just advance the plot and reveal salient character traits but also suggests that events in life are inextricable from all the many seemingly unrelated things that run through people’s minds: deep-rooted memories that return, imaginings and philosophical musings, reflections about art and politics, even the way that a day may be shadowed by the preceding night’s dreams. Z and her friends do more than endure the pressure of the public sphere—they struggle against it for control of their inner and outer lives.
To do this, Ford builds the drama with exhilarating freedom. As the title suggests, the film indeed opens with a dream, one that emerges from the nightmares of history. It’s presented as an impressionistic historical montage, of Black farmworkers and the land, with clips of Black history that include modern suburbs, and a woman—Z herself—who gazes out of a door into a sere expanse of land bordered by low mountains. It’s Z’s dream, and in the morning she relates it to her partner, Reece (Charlie Barnett). “I think my ancestors are trying to tell me something,” Z says. The working-out of that vision, by way of experience that arises from her sudden change of circumstances, is the movie’s emotional and intellectual heart, its main line, abstract in form but altogether concrete in the decisions that result.
Much of “Dreams in Nightmares” takes place before the road trip, and these early sequences are far more than exposition. Ford offers an intimate yet analytical cross-section of a milieu, of a way of life that’s inseparable from the characters’ professional activities and which sets the movie’s emotional tenor. All of the main characters are Black. Z lives in a polycule with Reece, a history professor who owns the home they share, and Dionne, a trans woman whose work is unspecified. Z, at loose ends after losing her job, heads to a martial-arts class, where she makes out with a woman she’s been eying. (Back home, she jovially tells her partners, to their congratulations.) Tasha’s roommate, the poet Lauren, is also trans. The night that Z gets to Brooklyn, the three friends go out clubbing—for which Tasha crops her long, straight hair, dons black leather, and, manifestly dressed for seduction (as her friends note), pursues a sexual encounter with a stranger in a bathroom at the club.
The road trip takes Z and her friends through places that they suspect may be hostile to Black and queer people, so they use Yelp the way that Black people during the era of segregation used the Green Book, seeking out Black-owned businesses along their route. They plan to spend their first night in Pittsburgh, where Toni (Joss Barton), a friend of Lauren’s, turns out to be giving a poetry reading that very night. The piece that Toni, a trans woman, performs (written by Barton) is exuberantly erotic and scathingly confrontational; afterward, Lauren, called up to the stage by Toni, delivers a reading of her own. The sequence runs about ten minutes, and, though intercut shots show some of the offstage life that Toni, a trans woman, is writing about, the focus is almost entirely on what takes place onstage. Ford is among the few filmmakers who succeeds in filming a stage performance with visual attention (a combination of duration and framing) that sustains literary continuity yet never recedes to mere home-video-like recording.
“Dreams in Nightmares” is, above all, a subjective refraction of the situation of Black people, queer people, nonbinary people, trans people, and artists in the United States in an age of reactionary repression. (It’s worth noting that—as indicated by the layoff e-mail that Z receives—the story is set in 2023, and thus it isn’t specifically a story of the second Trump Administration but of the wider age of Trumpery and the storms of hate it has unleashed.) Alongside the movie’s literal dreams are metaphorical ones: the collective American dream and the very American nightmares that prevent many Americans, particularly ones in certain categories, from realizing that dream.
Throughout, the ongoing discussions between the characters keep expanding the scope of the movie. Some of their talk is about art (Z discloses the premise of a planned novel to her new romantic interest); some of it is about emotion (a truth-or-dare-style game in a roadside café leads to philosophical riffs about character and self-image); some of it uninhibitedly emphasizes characters’ estrangement from their families and the urgent need to recompose families of their own, however nontraditional. The conversations have a specificity and energy that feels lived-in, creative, spontaneous. Watching the movie, I felt certain that the actors had contributed significantly to its composition—as, indeed, turns out to be the case, both with improvisations on camera and through discussions while the project was being developed and rehearsed. The visual perspective that Ford brings to dialogue is aptly responsive, impulsive, imaginative. The film’s observational intensity yields a form of symbolic realism that highlights both the action and its import—both the drama and the ideas and systems that undergird it.
Ford’s collaborative methods give rise to performances of an extraordinary immediacy, a sense of commitment to the characters’ quests for sexual freedom, freedom from fear, a measure of financial stability that isn’t necessarily wealth but is the absence of panic, a mental freedom from the static of insult and abuse, sufficient free time, emotional relationships tight in care but not binding in demands—which all prove inseparable from the work at the center of the film, the artist’s creative drive. The main actors in “Dreams in Nightmares,” though bursting with personality and individuality, also form a vital collective. Pardon my spoiler, but suffice it to say that, unlike in “L’Avventura,” the missing person in “Dreams in Nightmares” turns up, and not unhappily. The element of self-liberation that Kel represents—and that the actor in the role, Mars Storm Rucker, incarnates, loftily, heartily, radiantly—turns Ford’s film into a wise, loving, political paean to the life of art and the art of living well, nonetheless. ♦
