It is as much documentary as it is drama: adapted from a nonfiction book, cast with non-actors playing themselves , filmed in real landscapes and workplaces.
It was presented as a fly-on-the-wall documentary of the last night of a Vegas dive bar, but actually the bar is alive and well, and in New Orleans.
Or coming from a very different place, Sacha Baron Cohen’s recent Borat movie was also kind of “non-binary”: fictional characters co-opting real people into their narrative.
It’s unlikely we’d be fooled like that nowadays, although we still don’t always know what we’re getting: fraudulent documentaries such as Robert Flaherty’s infamous 1922 film Nanook of the North share modern parallels in the spread of fake news.
When you think about it, Nomadland is really not a million miles from “structured reality” shows such as Made in Chelsea or Keeping Up With the Kardashians.