Cannes 2013: Nebraska, review - Telegraph Dir: Alexander Payne; Starring: Bruce Dern, Will Forte, Bob Odenkirk, June Squibb, Stacy Keach. 110 min. The American filmmaker Alexander's Payne last picture was The Descendants, a colourful comic drama in which George Clooney played a Hawaiian landowner agonising over the impact the sale of his family's ancestral estate would have on his two young daughters. To me, the film felt out of keeping with Payne's earlier work: it never quite convinced you that the problems of rich, comfortable Hawaiians were of immediate importance, and the prevailing tone of the piece was so sour you could have pickled onions in it. Happily, his new film is The Descendants" exact opposite, to the extent that Payne could quite easily have called it The Ancestors. In fact its title is Nebraska, and it screened in Cannes on Thursday morning as part of the festival's competition strand. Payne's film is a bittersweet elegy for the American extended family, shot in a crisp black-and-white that chimes neatly with the film's concern for times long past. The story centres on David Grant (Will Forte), an aimless man in his mid-40s, who drives his alcoholic and possibly senile father Woody to Hawthorne, Nebraska, the Midwest town of his birth. The original aim of the trip is not reconciliation, but hard cash: Woody, played by a wonderfully dazed Bruce Dern, has received a leaflet in the post that suggests he may have won $1 million in a lottery, and he is determined to collect the money in person from the company's office in the state capital. David decides to take him there; mainly to humour him, but also because his own life has wound down to a crawl. He is unfulfilled by his job at a hi-fi superstore and his girlfriend of two years has just moved out. Couple those with mounting parental disharmony - his mother (June Squibb) is at the end of her tether after Woody attempts to reach Nebraska on foot - and we find ourselves well over the Payne threshold. Father and son make a pit-stop in Hawthorne after Woody injures himself while drunk, and they stay there for a few nights with Woody's brother, his wife and their two adult sons. Word quickly gets around that Woody has come into a fortune - "no-foolin" money," as his ex-business partner Ed Pegram (Stacy Keach) calls it, with an avaricious glint - and lo, the vultures start to circle. The Grant family ties are well-frayed already, and Bob Nelson's script uses Woody's non-existent "win" as a way to pick them apart even further, while also delivering some tender passages of minor-key comedy. Later in the film, David's mother and elder brother Ross (Bob Odenkirk, from the TV series Breaking Bad) also pitch up in Hawthorne, and her blunt appraisals of former friends now laid to rest in the town cemetery are hilariously bleak, but also perversely soothing. This is a resounding return to form for Payne: there are moments that recall his earlier road movies About Schmidt and Sideways, but it has a wistful, shuffling, grizzly-bearish rhythm all of its own.