‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ Review: A Mississippi Life

‘You’re made of dirt, you know that?” So says one character to another in “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” though it isn’t meant as an insult. It carries instead a message of cosmic humility, an awareness of certain inevitable cycles of life, death and renewal. As the poet Stanley Kunitz once put it: “I only borrowed this dust.” In her debut feature, writer-director Raven Jackson has crafted a work of apt and artful modesty, finding fleeting resonances and achieving a delicate coherence before her film concludes its 90 or so minutes and crumbles back into the dust to which we all return. “All Dirt Roads” is difficult to firmly grasp, sometimes frustratingly so, but its textures linger.

The movie depicts the life of Mack, a black woman in rural Mississippi, through flashes of memory, feeling and atmosphere. It follows her from youth to adulthood, though it doesn’t abide by that order, instead flowing back and forth across time as it sketches the outlines and choice moments of its spare story. As a child, Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson) plays with friends, goes fishing, bikes around her small hometown, and gazes upward at her mother, Evelyn (Sheila Atim), in awe of the mature mysteries of her beauty, like the scarlet lipstick that she applies with impeccable style. Played as an adult by Charleen McClure, Mack eventually comes to know such challenges as lost love, pregnancy and grief.