John Steinbeck once wrote that America’s poor see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. The sentiment blows like a tumbleweed through Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, an elegiac, black-and-white road movie that uses the recession-torn ghost towns of America’s Midwest as the backdrop to its tale of an elderly man making his final bid to become a Rockefeller.

The hard but gently delivered irony here is that Woody Grant—a beyond taciturn Korean War vet played to perfection by Bruce Dern—has decided to cash in a phony-baloney sweepstakes promo he received through the mail. With the question of his mental health always present, Woody is determined to make the trip from Billings, Montana, to the sweepstakes offices in Lincoln, Nebraska. He’s eventually aided in the doomed quest by his sympathetic son David (played by former SNL cast member Will Forte in a breakout performance).

Screenwriter Bob Nelson, sitting in a room at the Sutton Place Hotel during the Vancouver International Film Festival, agreed that the tired old American Dream forms the tattered fabric of his first major film.

“It is true,” Nelson (familiar to many Vancouverites as a cast member on KING TV’s ’90s Seattle sketch-comedy show Almost Live) told the Georgia Straight. “It’s this ongoing dream that we don’t ever quite seem to get to but everybody keeps struggling for it, no matter how dire the circumstances. Even when we go through a great recession. I grew up in lower-class circumstances and, for me, I could always see the divide and the struggle.” The rub, as Nelson described it with a soft laugh: “You might not have the skills and the opportunity, but you are instilled at an early age that you can be anything.”

In director Payne’s hands, Nebraska, opening Friday (November 29), unwinds as a humane and bittersweet comic drama. But its reach goes further still. Tonally, there’s a clear line running from the film to the kind of grown-up cinema Hollywood was producing in the maverick early ’70s. “That’s exactly where this comes from,” Nelson affirmed, while the presence of Bruce Dern—one of the most visible faces of the era as he graduated from the Roger Corman stable to masterpieces like Coming Home (1978)—cinches the connection. It also gives one of America’s great actors the chance to finally escape a different kind of downturn.

“He’d kinda got railroaded into doing these characters or these crazy people,” said Nelson, who lobbied for Dern to get the role when he first shopped his script in 2002. “He said, ‘I just want to play a guy. A real person.’ ”

Real person or not, Forte said he “never stopped being overwhelmed” by the septuagenarian movie star. “I had the best seat in the house,” he told the Straight in a separate one-on-one interview. “I am, a lot of times, a foot, two feet away from watching this guy give the performance of a lifetime, you know?”

Forte also conceded that—in his first serious role—he could have fucked it all up. “That was something that did go through my head at times,” he said, smiling broadly. “I’m a classic overthinker-slash-neurotic-slash-OCD, and so it was really just because Alexander has such confidence in what he’s doing, knows exactly what he wants and has such a calming presence, and Bruce is so nurturing and was such a teacher and a friend…that I was able to kinda relax and get out of my head.”

The film’s more mythic resonances, meanwhile, have left the actor with a taste for Hollywood’s last golden age. “I don’t know it as well as I wish I did. I read [author Peter Biskind’s] Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and loved that,” he said, adding, significantly enough, that his other big job in the past year was for ’70s giant Peter Bogdanovich in the film Squirrels to the Nuts.

“I had seen The Last Picture Show but I’d never seen Paper Moon, and I’d never seen What’s Up, Doc?, and I got to go back and I was kicking myself. How did I never see these movies? And there are a million movies like that that I’ve never gotten the chance to see. And I hate myself for not seeing them, but I’m also so excited that I have these treasures that are waiting for me to watch. I’m excited to get going, so let’s finish this interview—I gotta get watching movies!”

To anybody else wanting to play catch-up: starting with Nebraska and working backwards is a hell of a good way to do it.