A father (Steve Ogg) and his daughter, Nola (Sabrina Carpenter), live off the grid, hopping from town to town in an aging RV. The mother has been out of the picture for a long time and exists to them through stories and photographs. The father and daughter are very close—she calls him by his first name, Clint—and he has taught her everything she knows, his most crucial lesson being that education in the United States is a scam and she’s better off learning from him. At the same time, she grows tired of him, and she voices her frustration at his inability to sit through a single movie and thus forcing her to hop from theater to theater in the multiplex. Then when he suddenly dies, she is left on her own. 

The Short History of the Long Road concerns Nola (Carpenter) and her efforts to cope with this loss and survive once she comes unmoored. Her cross-country trek takes her into the household of an outwardly kind but rigid and righteous churchgoer (Rusty Schwimmer), to the auto body shop of Miguel (Danny Trejo), whose trust she earns, and eventually into the diner where her long-lost mother (Maggie Siff) works. Director Ani Simon-Kennedy views most of these characters with kindness and strives to engage our empathy and bring to light the forces of love and belonging to anchor Nola’s life. 

So it feels remarkably ungenerous to say that this film, with its open appeal to the heart and the fundamental decency of the director’s outlook, scarcely contains a single scene that lands. Unfortunately, we are barely five minutes in when we have already lost our ability to believe in the characters we’ve just met. Scenes that are intended to be tragic inadvertently come off as comic, and there is always an enormous gap between what we are presumably supposed to feel and what we actually do. Many better films of wayward America (Running on Empty, Captain Fantastic, Leave No Trace) might strain plausibility if the plots are examined by a ruthlessly exacting eye, but this road trip loses it almost instantly. 

This is mostly because the characters spend so much time explaining who they are and their history that it is hard to actually believe them. So when the tragic loss occurs, neither the bond between Nola and Clint, nor their depiction as individuals, is palpable enough to sustain the drama. 

In Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, another film about a father and daughter who attempt to live off the grid, the two protagonists come alive within seconds and spend very little time explaining who they are or where they come from. In interviews, Granik has discussed an exacting research process, followed by a ruthless cutting down of the script with the lead actors and a camping trip the actors took to develop their characters’ bond. It is no surprise, therefore, that we feel their connection before they even speak. One does not have the feeling that the same level of work and thought went into the creation of The Short History of the Long Road. 

No humane viewer would deny the worthiness of the director’s intentions or how desperately we need films that celebrate compassion without yielding to sentimentality in these troubled times. I was more than willing to follow Nola on her quest to find a home. I just wish she had been brought fully to life.