Certain Women follows the tangentially intersecting stories of three characters from Livingston, Montana. First, we meet Laura (Laura Dern), an undercommitted yet overworked attorney who just can’t shake a workers’ comp case driving its victim mad. Next is Gina—played by Michelle Williams, a real-life native of beautiful Kalispell.

Gina is a bit of a conniver and married to Ryan, who is otherwise engaged with Laura. Ryan, proprietor of a very large and procyonine beard, is embodied by James LeGros, who will forever be the earnest, unguent "Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Man” from Singles. She feigns goodwill in order to get sandstone from a grumpy older fellow—who is keen to her ploy, but couldn’t care less and just wants a live ear to bitch to. She also takes extensive and cigarette-intensive walks while pretending to run and avoiding entanglements with her cross daughter.

Most interestingly, Kristen Stewart plays Laura, a recent law school grad who volunteers to teach a legal education class twice a week, not realizing it’s a four-hour drive. Each way. Jamie (Lily Gladstone), a local ranch hand, notices the relative action around the event and joins in. Eventually, Laura and the Jamie become dining buddies, which meets an end once Laura makes a pragmatic decision.

The actors are excellent and Gladstone, who hails from the reservation town of Browning, is particularly outstanding. There’s a lot to like about the spare but somehow meaty vignettes—with an easy parity and genuine sense of commitment emerging between the screenplay, characters, and landscape. Connections must be sought or would not otherwise transpire amid all the space and angst. A whiff of pragmatism supersedes all intimacies.

It’s directed by Kelly Reichardt—who also directed Wendy and Lucy and Meek’s Cutoff, both starring Williams—and based on the short stories of Maile Meloy, originally from Helena. Both Reichardt and Meloy chronicle women pioneers, of sorts, exploring the sometimes conspiratorial, sometimes antithetical forces of hope and independence inherent to the region.

The landscape is captured exquisitely and objectively. The plains--which are, indeed, windswept and hardscrabble--always seem to engulf the mountains that loom overhead and provide a sense of promise and aspiration, just out of reach. The characters echo this. They aim for ecstasy when they should settle for function. There is a constant push-pull with a zero-sum game. And everybody knows it. It’s just a matter of when, exactly, the jig is up.

Sorry to say, but competition between females of similar age and circumstance is a a foregone conclusion in pop culture. This cliché is explored in nuance, terror, and melodrama in this shrewd, inventive, sometimes hallucinogenic film.

Beth, played by Cailtin FitzGerald, is an emerging ingenue. FitzGerald is essentially Gwyneth Paltrow's younger sister--a beautiful wood nymph whose elegant insouciance assumes good naturedness and assures happy connectedness. Her career has progressed though a fortunate sequence of artistic compromises and ambiguous personal boundaries. She is adored, stealthily competitive, and ultimately unchallenging. Inertia roots for her.

Her counterpart is Anna, played by the ever-avid Mackenzie Davis, best know for Halt and Catch Fire--an intense hybrid of hunger and insolence. She relentlessly dominates Beth as they embark on an ill-conceived girls' weekend, outplaying her mentally and emotionally. Though it scarcely matters, as Beth collects all the indirect accolades in terms of a fan's heart and a veteran actor's interest.

What happens next is warped and deeply uncomfortable. Director Sophia Takal is able to sever ego from artifice to crown a woman that we would like to root for, but cannot really support. She is desperate and uncouth--oh, and homicidal. And that's not who we really are, is it?