Dreamland
A gender swapped Bonnie and Clyde, with a bizarre framing device as a smartass little girl as narrator, like the Inspector Gadget niece, or the protagonist of The Nice Guys.
The history concerns some Homestead Act recipients getting crappy land, and leading our family to break up. Since the Act started in force in the 1860’s, by the 1920’s Dust Bowl, the good lands are gone. She remarries, but the older boy is too emotionally stunted.
Her second husband is a cop, which makes it awkward that her son finds and falls for the female Clyde, recovering from a bullet wound in their unused barn. She escaped from a botched bank robbery, her male buddy was killed by the cops, a child died, and she has no car. Only her charm can save her.
When the net is tightening around her, and our boy is pushed around, he steals his stepfather’s truck and they escape both, even though she doesn’t really care for him and is merely using him. He’s apparently infatuated her, but he runs hot and cold, even then.
His idea is that while she doesn’t care about him now, but after a trip to Mexico, she will. This could be a road movie, but no, she falls for him in the first motel, after he swindles a local cop.
They run out of money and just rob the first bank they pass by, but our boy needs to kill someone, and tilts for a while. That previous fuck was well timed. His stepfather is onto them and manages to kill her, while the boy gets away. The end, roll credits.
There are several visual stunning imagery here, robbed from other films like The Wizard of Oz, but the plot is the weak spot. They got a competent B cast, plus Margot Robbie on the cusp of being a giant star. This was directed by the composer, John Carpenter-style.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.