“Dreams in Nightmares” Turns the Art Life Political

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.