Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, “Wendy and Lucy,” is 80 minutes long  it would fit inside Baz Luhrmann’s “Australia” twice, with room to spare  and does not contain a superfluous word or shot. Like “Old Joy” (2006), Ms. Reichardt’s modest and critically beloved second feature, “Wendy and Lucy” takes place mainly outdoors and registers the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest with unostentatious affection.

Instead of a musical soundtrack there is, for the most part, the sighing of the wind in the trees, the rumbling of freight trains and trucks and, sometimes, the absent-minded humming of Michelle Williams, who plays Wendy, a young woman drifting through Oregon and Washington on her way to Alaska.

The Northwestern setting might put you in mind of a story by Raymond Carver, whose clean-lined prose has something in common with Ms. Reichardt’s reserved and attentive shooting style. At first glance “Wendy and Lucy” looks so modest and prosaic that it seems like little more than an extended anecdote. A young woman pauses on her journey in a nondescript, weary town and encounters a run of bad luck, some of it brought about by her own bad decisions. Her car breaks down. She is arrested for shoplifting. Her dog goes missing.

But underneath this plain narrative surface  or rather, resting on it the way a smooth stone rests in your palm  is a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society. Much as “Old Joy” turned a simple encounter between two longtime friends into a meditation on manhood and responsibility at a time of war and political confusion, so does “Wendy and Lucy” find, in one woman’s partly self-created hard luck, an intimation of more widespread hard times ahead.