Jennifer Lawrence in Causeway (TIFF)

Jennifer Lawrence is back and Euro art-house cinema’s got her. Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but her best film in years, Causeway, unfolds beat by beat, with straight-to-the-point editing and a stripped down spareness more reminiscent of international film than even U.S. indies, but under the direction of an American filmmaker, Lila Neugebauer. Its documentary-like focus shares a common bond with the Dardenne brothers’ earlier, kitchen-sink dramas, as well.

With a script by novelists Ottessa Moshfegh, Luke Goebel, and Elizabeth Sanders, the lean story line centers solely on Lawrence, one of the best moment-to-moment actors of her generation. Instinctively emotional, she’s an actor first, movie star second (this holds true even in The Hunger Games). Her role as a military engineer recovering from a brain injury and returning to her working-class New Orleans neighborhood and splintered family can’t help but draw comparisons to her breakout role in Winter’s Bone in 2010—the tone is as somber. It’s a quietly intense performance for a quiet film. 

In a prologue, Lynsey (Lawrence) travels from treatment in Europe to Nebraska. She lives under the care of the folksy, maternal Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell) as she undergoes rehabilitation, learning to walk and move again. In short order within the script’s time line, she’s physically ready to leave. As though she’s out of a Thomas Wolfe novel, she knows she can’t go home again, yet she does, and proves the Southern writer wrong—you can go back to where you were born and raised, though under different terms and conditions.

Her return is off to a bumpy start when no one greets her at the bus depot. After walking home, she goes into the backyard to find the family’s mini-swimming pool in a state of neglect—it looks more like a biology experiment. There are dirty dishes in the sink, and her first encounter with her mother, Gloria (Linda Emond), occurs when Gloria comes home late at night and finds her daughter resettled in her old bedroom. She thought Lynsey was returning on another day.

So disconnected is their communication that Gloria doesn’t know that Lynsey has found a job shortly upon her return, cleaning pools. On her first day driving to work, the family truck goes on the fritz and needs hundreds of dollars’ worth of repairs. She leaves it in the auto shop of James (Brian Tyree Henry) and the two at first bond superficially. Lynsey still has a slight limp when she walks, and she has noticed that James walks similarly. Her injury was caused in Afghanistan by an IED. James lost his lower left leg in a car accident.

One example of deft direction has Lynsey revealing to James, during a night out on the town, how she was injured when she was with the U.S. Army Core of Engineers in Afghanistan. Instead of milking her story for all its pathos and horror, she’s recalls it calmly, and it’s apparent she’s told this story to officers, doctors, and nurses dozens and dozens of times before. It is a part of her autobiography as much as knowing her date of birth.

She functions well under a heavy daily dose of medication to fight off depression. Yet despite her injury, she wants her old military job back. She adamantly believes there’s nothing for her in the Crescent City, where her older brother’s life was overtaken by drugs and her mom forgets to take her to her doctor appointments. She has a point when she tells James, “I don’t think it’s really healthy to stay.” However, she will need her doctor’s approval. 

Both Lawrence and the laidback Henry match the ambiance set by the direction. Each scene offers a new facet to both of them, building the momentum for their unfolding relationship, the “beginning of a beautiful friendship,” to quote Casablanca. When the otherwise terse script leads to verbal shouting match between the two, it’s an earned showdown.

Television (Maid) and theater (Broadway’s The Waverly Gallery) director Neugebauer makes her debut feature here and draws upon a largely New York theater ensemble to fill out her cast, including Emond, Houdyshell, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Fred Weller. Perhaps wisely, not many in the cast attempts a Southern drawl.

Causeway will be released in theaters on November 4.