Editor’s note: This review first appeared as part of Polygon’s coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s streaming release.

Frances McDormand seems like an anomaly in the world of writer-director Chloé Zhao, whose most high-profile credit, Marvel’s Eternals, has yet to be released. Zhao’s films thus far — Songs My Brothers Taught Me and The Rider — both paint as realistic a portrait of the world as possible without becoming documentaries. They almost exclusively star first-time actors, usually playing versions of themselves. They certainly don’t feature anyone as recognizable as McDormand, who recently won an Oscar for her performance in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. But for all the star power McDormand brings to Zhao’s latest film, Nomadland, based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, the story Zhao weaves doesn’t buckle under that pressure. It also doesn’t feel any less real.