In Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, an art dealer played by Adrien Brody says this about an abstract artist:

“One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he’s doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship or something that’s actually supposed to look like the thing it’s actually supposed to look like. Can he do it?”

If you apply that theory to David Lynch, then 1999’s The Straight Story is the movie that proves — beneath all the arthouse trappings and freaky dream logic — he actually knows what he’s doing.

This quiet drama is the unlikeliest, and most accessible, film in Lynch’s filmography. It recounts the true story of Alvin Straight, an elderly Iowa man who — upon learning his estranged brother was ill — embarked on a 240-mile journey to Mount Zion, Wisconsin, to make amends. And he did it on a slow-moving John Deere lawnmower.

79-year-old Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin Straight with grace and gravitas, bringing real-world pathos to the role because he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was nominated for Best Actor, and took his own life later that year.

Alvin encounters a series of people along the way — a young hitchhiker, a fellow World War II veteran, a group of cyclists — and leaves them all with pearls of wisdom. None of this feels forced. The dialogue is natural, the characters feel more like real people than actors. In fact, the movie this reminds me of the most is Nomadland, with its non-professional actors and improvised dialogue.

If The Straight Story feels unlike any other Lynch film, it’s likely because he didn’t write the script. Instead, his longtime creative partner (and one-time wife) Mary Sweeney handled writing duties with her friend John Roach.

But Lynch tells that story with uncharacteristic restraint, lingering on the majestic midwestern landscapes, weaving Angelo Badalamenti’s beautiful score into vignettes about people treating each other with kindness.

This is a particularly poignant movie to watch right now, with the country so painfully divided. Lynch has made so many movies that feel like dreams, but the decency and warmth of the regular Americans depicted here is now its own sort of far-fetched fantasy.