Small Pleasures, Scattered Amid Struggles

The writer and director Ava DuVernay is after something exquisitely simple in “Middle of Nowhere”: she wants you to look, really look, at her characters. Mostly, Ms. DuVernay, who won the directing award at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, wants you to look at Ruby, a lonely young nurse (Emayatzy Corinealdi), whose husband, Derek (Omari Hardwick), is serving time. At once tethered to the world and seemingly detached from its thrum, Ruby dedicates herself to Derek, whom she regularly visits by riding a bus to the prison with all the other dutifully waiting women.

A plaintive, slow-boiling, quietly soul-stirring drama about a woman coming into her own, “Middle of Nowhere” carries the imprimatur of Sundance, but without the dreary stereotypes or self-satisfied politics that can (at times unfairly) characterize its offerings. The journey is hard in Ms. DuVernay‘s movie, as well as politically freighted, but also more complex than it might initially seem. Like the title character in Victor Nuñez’s “Ruby in Paradise,” an understated American independent classic with Ashley Judd that surely inspired this movie, Ms. DuVernay’s Ruby lives in a recognizable world of familiar pleasures, disappointing setbacks and everyday struggles. Ruby also lives in Compton, a city directly southeast of Los Angeles and probably best known to most Americans as the backdrop for gangsta entertainments.

The Compton in “Middle of Nowhere,” by contrast, is an ordinary, nondescript place with the usual sad swaying palm trees and working people nodding to one another while they wait for a bus. The sun shines, but this isn’t the Southern California of endless warmth and limitless possibility, as suggested by the worry that flickers across Ruby’s face and seems to have permanently hardened her mother, Ruth (a potent, mesmerizing Lorraine Toussaint), turning her features into a Kabuki-like grimace, frozen in fury. It’s an unsettling image of maternal rage — Ruth enters the movie in a housecoat, perhaps in a sly nod to “Precious” — one that Ms. DuVernay, as she does throughout, plays with before peeling away the clichés and revealing the person underneath.

Ms. DuVernay takes her time with Ruby, a circumspect, retiring character whose story surfaces in realistic conversations, and in phone calls and visits to the prison. Seemingly friendless, she lives alone in a small, dimly lighted, somewhat emptied out apartment that feels almost abandoned. In a sense that’s precisely what it has become. Ruby, having single-mindedly dedicated herself to her husband for years — she has a thick file of documents that testifies to the time she’s served for him — has essentially abandoned her home and herself. About the only other person in her life, aside from Derek and Ruth, is her sister, Rosie (Edwina Findley), a single mother with a young son. As you watch Ruby with her nephew, it’s clear that she hasn’t entirely let go of her life, but instead put it on long-term pause.

With her director of photography, Bradford Young, who brings soft beauty to every image, Ms. DuVernay uses long shots, a shallow depth of field and punctuating close-ups of Ruby to put her existential and physical isolation into visual terms. There’s a haunted stillness to the character, which the camera, even hand-held, persuasively expresses. Time and again, you see Ruby looking out at the world through windows while riding to work and the prison, and every so often you also see what she sees, like a bus driver, Brian (a terrific David Oyelowo). Brian notices Ruby and in doing so surprises her. She’s forgotten all about herself, even as Ms. DuVernay, from start to finish in this very fine movie, works to make sure that Ruby is a woman to remember.

“Middle of Nowhere” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult language). There is some adult language that everyone has heard before, and probably used at least a few times.