“We’ve been visiting libraries on this tour and it’s a lot of fun learning people still read.” The words of The Burning Hell’s main man Mathias Kom before launching into “Give Up” stress he and his band are not typical rock‘n’rollers. “Give Up” itself is the rollicking song-story of a call-centre worker who goes to a library, finds inspiration in Herman Melville and then meets a mysterious woman who rings in. She gives him a poster of a kitten captioned “Never Give Up”. In the song’s pay off, Kom’s protagonist declares “when the going gets tough, I give up.”

The cape is not an everyday item of clothing. Worn by magicians, it brings an air of the extraordinary. It billows in the path of superheroes. The cloak of invisibility confirms the cape’s singularity. Basia Bulat was first seen in a sparkly gold cape on the sleeve of her recent Good Advice album and last night it was integral to the renewed vigour of her music and stage persona. Moved to say how hard it was play guitar with its folds fluttering, she nonetheless did not take the easy path and discard it.

News that Richmond Fontaine were calling it a day with one final album and tour was not itself a surprise: across latter-day releases, from at least 2009’s We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River, the music had become progressively incidental, an increasingly subtle backdrop to frontman Willy Vlautin’s surprisingly widescreen storyteller’s vision of small-town Americana.

Music is no exception to the rule that history is littered with winners and losers. In commercial terms, however they are looked at, San Francisco’s Charlatans were losers. They issued just one single in 1966 and a belated album in 1969. While the world hummed along with Scott McKenzie’s "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)" in 1967, these pioneers of the city’s scene were without a label and left adrift in the rush to sign Bay Area bands.

Back in the early 2000s, it was rumoured that Ryan Adams had covered Is This It by The Strokes in its entirety. According to my extensive cataloguing of the career of Americana’s enfant terrible, only “Last Nite” ever surfaced (I have a live version, which opens with a couple of versions of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”), but the point is that Ryan Adams is no stranger to these sonic experiments.

When you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, as I am, there’s a game that you end up getting quite good at: one in which you have to separate the stories, about the hard-drinkin’, hard-livin’ workingman, from the multi-millionaire songwriter. Roots rocker Jason Isbell writes from a similar place as Springsteen – albeit on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line – but his work has never presented as much of a dichotomy.

I often think that, once a band hits certain milestones – longevity, moderate commercial success, critical acclaim – it can be difficult to know where to begin. I don’t mean the big bands, with the songs you’d recognise if you heard them in an advert or at a festival, their big hits acting as gateway drugs to those who’d like to find out more; but rather those mid-level indie bands beloved by those in the know and yet whose names prompt glazed looks when your colleagues ask you who you went to see at the weekend.

Your mum told you (or at least, I hope someone did) that it wasn't about being pretty, it was about having personality. True wisdom though this is, you probably also noticed that there are some jobs where it appears to be necessary to conform to a certain model of style or appearance. Playing the princess roles in ballet is one of these, though it's not about prettiness: for practical reasons you have to be shorter and considerably lighter than the men who will partner you.

 “You're plain as an old tin pail and you're bossy.” Tommy Lee Jones’s George Briggs doesn’t mince his words while sitting across the table from Hilary Swank’s Mary Bee Cuddy. She’s just told him that “if you lied to me and intend on abandoning your responsibility, then you are a man of low character, more disgusting pig than honourable man.” This undeniably funny exchange shines like a gold nugget in mud when set against the overall tone of the formidable The Homesman, a western which Jones describes, in one of the DVD’s on-set extras, as “minimal.”

The Homesman also focuses on women in the west – Cuddy, unmarried and running her own farm, has taken on a job that no man will do. It’s the 1850s. After a terrible winter in Loup City, Nebraska, three wives have serious mental health problems. Life is grim, and seen unflinchingly on camera to be exceedingly grim. It is decided that the trio will be taken back east to Iowa and the care of a minister’s wife (Meryl Streep, in a cameo). No one will volunteer to make the journey so Cuddy says she will. This is man’s work – the work of the titular homesman. She comes across Briggs and engages him to accompany her. He’s no good and about to be hung, but the promise of $300 is enough inducement for him. The pairing is a classic odd couple.

Along the way, they repeatedly encounter hindrances: poor weather, an abductor and Native Americans. One hindrance is so unpredictable, it is impossible not to gasp when it comes.

Although bleak and unsentimental, The Homesman is shot through with humanity. And it's beautifully composed. Open spaces are captured with an austere magnificence. The music is fantastic too. After watching this powerful film, it’s a jolt to watch the extras and see Jones and Swank at Cannes in modern-day clothing – the world conjured by The Homeman is so persuasive that both actors seem indivisible from the parts they play.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Homesman

It would probably be best to start this review with a mention of the band, The War on Drugs, whose 2014 LP, Lost in the Dream, saw them realise their potential in a flurry of "Best Of" lists and almost unbelievable hyperbole. However, before we get fully into that, I should state, for the record, that I’ve always hated Brixton Academy. The rake plays havoc with my calves and the beer tastes homeopathically weak, while sound spirals and muddies as it travels into the gods before falling back to earth like a plague of shit brown noise.