The dinner was Reichardt’s first introduction to any sort of life outside the mainstream. She began sleeping on her neighbors’ couches, attending their parties. She took night classes to get access to equipment, which she used to film their projects; the films, in turn, became her application to art school. After graduating from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, she moved to New York City and, after a few years, began writing her first feature film, “River of Grass.”

Reichardt once described “River of Grass,” which was met with positive if not career-catalyzing reviews, as “a road movie without the road, a love story without the love and a crime story without the crime.” It was released in 1994, a full 12 years before her next movie. She spent half that time couch-surfing, including a few months in Hollywood, trying and failing to get something made in a place that, as she realizes now, required skills like pitching and schmoozing that she didn’t even knew existed. “I came back to New York thinking: This is torturous. What do I even like about this?” she said. “The answer, it turned out, was: I like holding my camera. I like shooting and thinking about frames.”

She went back to making short Super 8 films, mostly shot outside. “They were really not good,” she insists. Still, one made it to the Venice Film Festival. “Of course my producer and I weren’t invited to any of the parties,” she said. “So we sat on the riverbank and watched these parties that were happening on boats. It really was an epiphany. I thought, This is exactly where I want to be: not at the party but on the bank of a river, with my friend, looking on at it.”

She used $30,000 she inherited from a great-aunt to make “Old Joy,” a misanthropic buddy film shot on 16-millimeter and co-starring the indie-rock musician Will Oldham. Since then, Reichardt has worked continuously, releasing a new film every two or three years. For her, this pace is an act of self-preservation. “I’m not great with the production of real life — the car, the insurance, the dentist — all those things that seem to mount up if you don’t have a project and become the meat of your day,” she told me.

If Reichardt’s ineffectual years in Hollywood taught her anything, it was the value of identifying undesirable ways of working and living — and then developing the confidence to avoid them. She lives alone in a rent-stabilized apartment in New York and maintains a normal person’s sense of money. “It’s still like a house,” she says when the budgets for her pared-down productions come up. In exchange for working outside the system, she has earned the privilege of final cut. “Nobody comes into my editing room, ever,” she told me. “Art by committee is a really bad idea.”

“Certain Women,” her latest film and arguably the most precise expression of Reichardt’s vision to date, is a triptych based on three short stories by the Montana-raised author Maile Meloy. It follows a small-town lawyer (Laura Dern) trying fruitlessly to convince a man injured on a contracting job that making a claim against his former employer would be hopeless; an unhappily married couple (Michelle Williams plays the wife) in the midst of harvesting sandstone for a weekend house; and a recent law-school graduate (Kristen Stewart) who becomes the object of fixation for a reclusive female ranch hand. Though each restrained vignette is connected by only a blink-and-you-miss-it narrative delicacy, an active loneliness unites the characters, whose inner desolation seems at least in part a reaction to the barren winter plains of southern Montana. Like so many of Reichardt’s protagonists, each of the women is a “figure of repose,” to quote Robert Warshow’s famous essay “The Westerner” — people whose “melancholy comes from the ‘simple’ recognition that life is unavoidably serious.”