Already seized by New York Times critic A.O. Scott as a formative example of ‘neo-neorealism’, Wendy and Lucy is Kelly Reichardt’s second feature to be adapted from a Jonathan Raymond story, and it’s an unqualified success in restrained – and recessional – filmmaking.

Driving north and west from Indiana, Wendy is a boyish American alien in her ’20s, played by Michelle Williams with quiet but fecund anonymity. She’s more meticulous than the pot-smoking drifters she meets on the way, their piercings illuminated by campfire to give them the look of refugees from Mad Max. Wendy keeps a notebook documenting every expenditure (she’s down to $525, strapped around her stomach), and her first priority is the upkeep of her dog, Lucy (the Pedigree biscuits are also running low). Aiming for a seasonal job at a salmon cannery in Ketchikan, Alaska, her ’88 Honda Accord instead comes to a halt in an unnamed Oregon town, where she makes a vague but vital friendship with an elderly security guard, abortively attempts to shoplift dogfood, and loses Lucy.

As Wendy trails her beloved companion, we see the greater disaster that is jobless smalltown Oregon. The natural timelag of cinema means we haven’t technically seen anything reacting directly to the downturn, but Wendy and Lucy is full of economic auguries. Wendy’s fate is determined by a supermarket clerk who nerdily insists on Wendy’s wrongdoing (‘If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t have a dog’), leading to a $50 fine, while human ballast is provided by the eight-to-eight watchman of a pharmacy parking lot. His generosity is the oasis in a landscape of helpless indifference, but amounts to little: his parting gift is exactly $7, plus a polite invitation to return someday.

In verse, the story might gain the blue-collar romance of a Springsteen song, but Reichardt fixes her lens on the non-transcendent realities of post-industrial life: the dowdiness of the asphalt roads, the interminably ugly housing. If Wendy is running from anything other than herself, Reichardt doesn’t care to make it specific. Down to her last dollars, it’s not even relevant. Wendy falls from the position of job-seeking, dog-owning traveller to homeless can collector in a matter of hours, and the town has none of the advantages usually associated with community. Besides the occasional piece of good luck, Wendy is alone, and the only financial promise the west has to offer is her dream of employment in an Alaskan fish factory.

In a diner scene, Reichardt photographs an extra reading Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, an older story of hard times and social fragmentation in the northwest. The film looks like it could succeed just as well without explicit quotations like this – likewise the cameo appearance of Oregon landscapist Michael Brophy, stacking shelves – but they emphasise the film’s surprising capacity for political comment. The language is mostly reluctant, and functional; only once do we get a speech, and it’s from Wendy’s priestly security guard, who understands and explains Wendy’s catch-22: ‘It’s all fixed.’

This suggests defeat, but the film is really about struggle, hope not really situated at the end of Wendy’s journey, but during it, in her fortitude, and her final acceptance that being alone and socially redundant isn’t quite the worst-case scenario.