Carey Mulligan in Wildlife (Scott Garfield/IFC FIlms)

Actor Paul Dano makes an impressively auspicious directorial debut with Wildlife, based on Richard Ford’s 1990 novel and co-written with his partner (and fellow actor) Zoe Kazan. As is usually the case with films directed by actors, the performances are uniformly impressive, but what’s most remarkable is the artful and intimately lived-in details Dano and Kazan bring to American small-town life decades before their own time.

The film centers on the Brinson family, who live in Great Falls, Montana, in the early 1960s: Joe (Ed Oxenbould), the 14-year-old boy whose point of view largely drives the narrative; and his parents, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan) and Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal). They seem on the surface to be a fairly typical sort of middle-class family, but it’s evident that there are simmering tensions underneath.

Early on, Jerry is fired from his job as a golf course groundskeeper for the rather absurd reason of being overly friendly with the customers. Jeanette is concerned by Jerry’s reaction to the firing. He sullenly broods, beer often in hand, rather than actively seek other work. Jeanette and Joe are even more disturbed when Jerry angrily and pridefully rejects a job offer after his employers at the golf course have a change of heart. Joe is especially worried that they’ll have to move, since they’ve already had to several times over the years because of Jerry’s unstable employment.

To make ends meet, Jeanette steps in, taking on a part-time job as a swim instructor. Though she struggles to keep up a cheery front, it’s apparent that there are deep fissures between her and Jerry. These tensions boil over when Jerry announces that he’ll take a job helping to put out wildfires in the mountains, unsafe and not especially well-paid work that will take him away from the family for months.

It’s here that Jeanette emerges more prominently as the central character, even though events are still framed from Joe’s perspective. Mulligan shines as her character shifts, becoming bitter and cynical for feeling abandoned by her husband and trapped in a life that no longer is fulfilling, if it ever truly was. Her options, or compromises, are clearly based based on what is expected of her as a mother and wife in that specific era.

Jeanette searches for some relief, and she seems to find it in one of her students, Mr. Miller (Bill Camp), a middle-aged, wealthy divorcee who would hardly seem a match for Jeanette, but at this point she’s looking for any type of stability, financial or otherwise. Her pursuit of this affair may strike viewers as selfish and wildly destructive, a human equivalent to the fires her husband is fighting many miles away. However, through Mulligan’s captivating portrayal, we understand and sympathize with the reasons behind her actions.

The hushed and understated yet wholly engrossing drama is beautifully supported by the composed images and settings, with handsome and meticulously detailed cinematography by Diego Garcia. It’s well in keeping with the carefully framed visuals that Joe takes up a job at a photography studio, where he helps customers create portraits of themselves that they wish to project to the world. And it’s one of Joe’s compositions that form Wildlife’s final image, one that may be illusory yet holds out a glimmer of a hopeful future, however faint.