The best movies to watch when you’re feeling lost

No matter how carefully you’ve mapped out your life, it is still possible to feel lost, as if your life’s compass is spinning in all directions at once. When you’re feeling cut adrift, movies can be more than a distraction, they can be a source of inspiration to help you get back on track.

Here are five films with messages about finding purpose and direction in life.

“Wild,” a film from Jean-Marc Vallée, the late Academy Award nominated director of “Dallas Buyer’s Club,” is a road movie. Or rather, a path movie, as star Reese Witherspoon hardly spends any of her 1,000-mile journey from Mojave Desert to Canada on an actual road.

Witherspoon is Cheryl Strayed, a literate young woman whose life spins out of control after a family tragedy. The story of her physical survival—too tight boots, toenail trauma, dehydration—is less interesting than her quest for emotional survival.

Witherspoon is best not when she’s fumbling with a bowl of cold mush or a broken propane heater, but when she puts herself “in the way of beauty,” to become the woman her mother (a terrific Laura Dern) said she could be. Mom told her to “find your best self and hold on to it,” which is not only good advice, but also gives Witherspoon the chance to dig deep to find the character.

She can play the comedic bits—struggling with a backpack twice as big as her and being mistaken for a “lady hobo”—but it’s the sensitive stuff that hits home here.

“Moonlight” is a film about a young man trying to find a place for himself in the world. “At some point you got to decide who you going to be,” says an early mentor. “Can’t let anybody make that decision for you.”

Director Barry Jenkins splits the story into thirds, each examining a different time in the life of Chiron, a young, gay Black man, as he comes to grips with who he is. “Moonlight” is a movie that beats with a very human heart while subverting expectations with almost every scene.

Jenkins has placed obstacles in the way of the storytelling—multiple actors playing the same characters, and a lead who is succinct almost to the point of being mute—but overcomes those hurdles with a combination of social conscience, fine acting and interesting characters who constantly defy pigeonholing.

Each deliver performances characterized by deep inner work that reveals the truth behind the façade Chiron uses as a front. There’s a remarkable consistency in the trio of performances, so by the end of the film, when Chiron is asked, “Who is you man?” his answer, “I’m me. I don’t try to be nothing else,” rings true and real.

“Frances Ha,” the seventh film from “Greenberg” director Noah Baumbach, isn’t so much a traditional narrative as it is a character study of Frances (“Barbie” director Greta Gerwig), an underemployed dancer struggling to find herself in New York City.

It plays like a cleaned up black-and-white version of “Girls;” it’s an emotionally rich and funny portrait of twenty-something ennui. Gerwig and Baumbach paint a compelling portrait of a woman who doesn’t always make the right choices, who doesn’t always even learn from her mistakes, but is never anything less than human and interesting.

By the time she comments on her own choreography, that she likes “things that look like mistakes,” we understand that the errors she makes offstage, during her dance of life, are the very thing that build her character.

Unlike “Girls,” a television show that mined similar territory, “Frances Ha” never stoops to shock value to make its point. Instead, it relies on warmth and charm to capture the vagaries of a mostly rudderless life. It feels more intimate and raw than the usual twenty-ish crisis flick, and with each detail we get another piece of the puzzle that makes up Frances’ life.

“The Fault in Our stars” is an adolescent “Love Story.” Based on John Green’s young adult novel about two teenagers who fall in love after meeting in a cancer support group, it’s a five-hankie film that has been making young adult readers spout tears like water shooting from fire hydrants since the book’s release in 2012.

Shailene Woodley plays Hazel Grace Lancaster, a 16-year-old first diagnosed with cancer when she was 13. When she joins a support group for kids with cancer at a local church, she meets Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort), a handsome 18-year-old former athlete who lost a leg to osteosarcoma. It sounds like it has all the elements of a major summer bummer, but despite being set in what Hazel calls the “Republic of Cancervania,” it avoids the maudlin.

Instead, the story is told with acerbic wit, filtered through the life experiences of characters who have rarely known a healthy day. In the film’s opening minutes, Hazel says she doesn’t live in a world where “nothing is so messed up it can’t be fixed by a Peter Gabriel song,” suggesting that there won’t be any easy answers offered up here. But, despite the life-and-death subject matter, it is a cathartic, sweet and tenderly told story about the power of love.

In “C’mon C’mon” soft-spoken radio journalist Johnny, played by Joaquin Phoenix, travels around the United States, interviewing children about their lives, experiences and the future. While looking after his nine-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman), he becomes a father figure as the pair travel on work trips to New York and New Orleans.

This is a quiet movie that speaks volumes. It asks simple questions, like “Are you happy?” and tries, often in a roundabout way, to answer them. Jesse and Johnny’s conversations, which make up the vast bulk of the movie, are simultaneously insightful, frustrating and vulnerable. Just like real life.

Oscar winner Phoenix approaches Johnny with warmth and keeps the theatrics to a minimum. They complement one another, feeling out their relationship as they go, learning from one another. It’s lovely in its ordinariness, made even more special by the naturalistic performances. I don’t know if “C’mon C’mon” will become immortal, it’s a little too freeform for that, but the simple human truths it essays already are.