Like Jill McCorkle’s 2009 short story titled “Intervention,” Nebraska explores the strange dynamics of relationships between parents and their children: Why are our parents the way they are and how do their habits and lifestyles both create and restrain us? In the story, McCorkle writes, “If you live long enough, your children learn to love you from afar, their lives are front and center and elsewhere. Your life is only what they can conjure from bits and pieces. They don’t know how it all fits together.” Though he’d never speak them, these words could be the manifesto of Woodrow Grant, the man at the center of Alexander Payne’s remarkable new film.