They have the will, yes, but is there a way?

It could be described as a road movie set on the bridge to nowhere.

As “Wendy and Lucy” opens, a young woman named Wendy (played by actress Michelle Williams, her usual blond hair turned into a matted, chestnut mop) is driving through Oregon to seek work at the canneries in Alaska. Her only companion is her dog, Lucy, and the two of them are on a tight budget as they struggle to make their journey north. All it takes is a few misfiring pistons to set their plans off-course.

The film, which opened in Los Angeles on Friday before expanding around the country, has been one of the hits of the year’s festival circuit. After its premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it has gone on to play at major festivals in New York, Toronto, Los Angeles and London. It was recently nominated for best picture and lead actress at Film Independent’s upcoming Spirit Awards.

Director Kelly Reichardt’s previous feature, the minimalist “Old Joy” (2006, airing on Sundance at 5 p.m. today), was a look at two male friends who embark on a camping trip only to find their old dynamics no longer hold true. That film turned the buddy picture into a treatise on cultural malaise in the wake of the red state/blue state divide, and now, with “Wendy and Lucy” Reichardt is again able to fashion a film that works on multiple levels. Although Wendy’s story can be taken at face value, as a poetic tale of resilience and inner resolve, it’s hard not to read in a larger social significance.

“ ‘Wendy and Lucy’ comes out of this post-Katrina gap in the rich and the poor getting so huge,” Reichardt said. “I remember, after Katrina, feeling that the administration had, it wasn’t just an indifference for poverty but a hostility toward it. So we started with the idea of, if you don’t have any money and you don’t have a social network, you don’t have any of these nets, can you really better your situation? If you actually have the spirit and the gusto of ‘I want to make my life better’ -- is that enough?”

Reichardt and writer Jon Raymond (they also collaborated on “Old Joy”) created the screenplay for “Wendy and Lucy” in an unusual way. They decided on the story together, and then Raymond, author of the acclaimed novel “The Half-Life,” wrote a short story, “Train Choir,” with input from Reichardt. In turn, Reichardt adapted that story into a script with input from Raymond. They share writing credit on the film.

From there, Reichardt was able to get in touch with Williams through her close friend Todd Haynes (an executive producer on both “Old Joy” and “Wendy and Lucy”) when he was directing the actress in his film “I’m Not There.”

The layered themes of Reichardt’s film -- at once a simple, emotive story of a girl and her dog and a film of roiling discontent regarding the state of the nation -- makes the story into a delicate balancing act for both director and actor.

“My conversations with Jon at the beginning, about what ‘Wendy and Lucy’ was going to be about, before he went off to write the story, was always inclusive of what’s happening in the world,” Reichardt explained. “But those conversations would never happen with Michelle. I would only want her to be thinking of Wendy. In the end I’m not trying to make a political film, I want to make a personal film.”

Williams, who shot the film in summer 2007 after her split from ex-fiance Heath Ledger (who died last January from an accidental drug overdose), spends a fair amount of screen time by herself, and her evocative, soulful turn is in some ways a conjuring act; the trick is remaining watchable even while not doing much of anything at all.

“Kelly and I didn’t really talk about the social significance of it,” Williams said, “or that it was a political film in any way. Kelly never really talked to me about those ideas that were behind it. I sort of learned afterward that she wanted to make a story about the state of America.”

Reichardt is different from many independent filmmakers in that she has a relatively steady day job teaching filmmaking at schools such as Bard College -- all promotional duties and festival appearances are done around her teaching schedule -- and so she is not looking for Hollywood to come knocking with bigger and better offers.

Having been dismayed by the experience of making her first feature, 1994’s “River of Grass,” with a crew of 13 that was too big for her taste, Reichardt is determined to keep her productions manageable and the experience of making her films, as she puts it, “private.” She also edits her films herself in her one-room apartment, living closely with the films for months on end while she is cutting them together.

“I wouldn’t want my films to be as on-the-nose and self-righteous as I can make them sound,” she said. “I go through all this work to make films that are not ‘This is what the film is about’ and then you spend the next year of your life going out with the movie and talking about what the film is about. And I don’t know how to get around that.

“I hate talking about the movie too much, because I like people to fill in the blanks for themselves and for there to be more than one answer to it. I hope these films have space.”

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