LOST AND POUND: Michelle Williams is Wendy and Lucy.

“If a person can’t afford dog food, they shouldn’t have a dog,” decrees the sanctimonious North Lombard Street grocery clerk who separates the titular characters of Wendy and Lucy by detaining one of them for shoplifting a can of Iams for the other. The equation is simple—no kibbles, no pooch—but it is also a matter of perspective. For Andy the checkout boy, it is an unassailable piece of moral logic. For Wendy, it is an inescapable injustice: She accepts her arrest mutely, leaving Lucy tied to a bike rack, but the plea in the eyes of actress Michelle Williams says that her poverty is the exact reason why she urgently needs to have a dog. As the poet Everlast once wrote, “You know where it ends/ Yo, it usually depends on where you start.” Maybe it would be a simpler matter if they could ask the dog.

Wendy started in Fort Wayne, Ind., with $800, a beat-up Honda Accord and Lucy, her golden retriever mix. She’s ended up halfway to Alaska, her car stalled in a Walgreens parking lot, surrounded by the Oregon industrial decay that Gus Van Sant once marked as his territory, but which now belongs definitively to director Kelly Reichardt. Wendy and Lucy, Reichardt’s first movie after the 2006 hot-spring meditation Old Joy, has traveled an odd, circuitous route of its own: The production began as a Northwest haven for Williams, who could mourn the death of ex-fiancé Heath Ledger while frolicking with Lucy, Reichardt’s own real-life pet. Six months later, critics nationwide have embraced the women’s collaboration as a lovable stray, praising this 80-minute slice of American digital video as a prototype of the filmmaking that will be salvaged from the economic crater. The poor are with us again!

But if Wendy and Lucy is indeed a harbinger of a new wave of recession neo-realism—Rome, Open City for the subprime-fallout kids—it must be judged by the same criterion that will face its imitators: Is this a genuine document of the frustrations that face the growing American underclass, or a patronizing visit from a Hollywood actress and a filmmaker from Bard? This is a closer call than I would like it to be. It’s hard to get a bead on exactly how poor the drifting duo actually are—the bandage on Wendy’s leg is caked with grime, but Lucy’s fur has a healthy sheen—and when Andy the judgmental bagger reveals a silver crucifix around his neck, the movie’s condescension reaches dangerous levels.

Reichardt is saved by her faithfulness, both to her story (written by Portlander Jon Raymond) and her actress. Her camera stays at Wendy’s side for every scene, loyal as a pup, and Williams rewards the attention. Her performance is a series of silent realizations, in which pursed lips and narrowed eyes yield to meek resignation. “I’m just passing through,” she repeatedly mutters, but as her plans fall out from under her, she recognizes she’s not going anywhere. Her epiphanies are the clue to unlocking the movie, which isn’t actually about being down and out in America, but about the fear of going broke—the dread of reaching dead-end poverty. Wendy’s most foolish decisions—including the fateful dog-chow theft—are products of this fear. When did that panhandler on the corner know he’d reached the point of no return, anyway? Was it when the first security guard told him he couldn’t sleep in the parking lot? Was it standing in line at the bottle return, holding the bag of cans that reek of stale booze? Is this where the slide begins? Can you ever come back? Can you ever get your best friend back?

As Wendy descends through each circle of insolvency, accompanied only by a kindly rent-a-cop (the phenomenal Walter Dalton) and a six-bar tune composed by Will Oldham for her to hum on the soundtrack, her cries of “LUUUU-CY! LUUUU-CY!” are increasingly lost in the moans of passing trains. She finally takes to sleeping in the North Portland woods where she once played fetch, hoping to encounter her traveling partner; instead, she is menaced by a bum, who issues the movie’s most significant warning: “They can smell the weakness on you.” Wendy and Lucy is a movie about a woman who is complicit in her own destitution and abandonment, if only because she is too daunted to do anything but capitulate. If this despair feels all too familiar right now, maybe it’s not because the poor are always with us. Maybe it’s because we sense that, at any moment, we could be with the poor.