Hilary Swank portrays a pioneering woman in “The Homesman”

Rated R for violent content, nudity, disturbing behavior, language. Check listings for theaters. 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Whether it’s learning to box, to fly a plane or to be a boy, Hilary Swank likes roles that push her, and challenge common perceptions about what it means to be female.

“I don’t choose roles where it matters if my wrinkles show,” said the two-time Oscar winner, during a stop at the Mill Valley Film Festival last month to promote her latest film, “The Homesman.” “All the characters I play are women I’d want as my friend.”

Starring opposite Tommy Lee Jones, who co-wrote and directed “The Homesman,” Swank plays straight-talking pioneer woman Mary Bee Cuddy, who lives “uncommonly” — alone in the new Nebraska Territories, where brutal weather, lack of medicine and loneliness pull three of her female neighbors into madness.

When the men in town refuse to help the women, Cuddy offers to brave freezing weather and bandits to drive them on a five-week journey by covered wagon to Iowa, where a minister has offered refuge. Her catatonic cargo includes a 19-year-old mother who loses her three children to diphtheria in a matter of days; an immigrant woman who is routinely raped by her husband, and forced to leave her dead mother’s body on the frozen plain to be eaten by scavengers; and a farmer’s wife, devastated by the failure of her cattle and crops, who murders her newborn baby.

Cuddy’s traveling companion is a sketchy claim-jumper played by Jones who needs to skip town.

Jones, a la Elmer Fudd, enters the movie after being dynamited out of an adobe shack by his enemies, befuddled and blinking through a mask of charcoal. He is a cantankerous boozer, more interested in the $300 Cuddy offers him than in shepherding the women to safety.

In a way Jones is playing a caricature of his tough-guy persona, which Swank said is a side, but only one side, of her seasoned co-star.

“Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t suffer fools easily, but there’s always so much more to someone’s personality than they let on,” Swank said. “Everyone thinks he’s so tough, but this movie shows his heart in a different way. It’s a very feminist movie, and the fact that it’s told by him is a very powerful statement about his heart.”

The things the women were struggling with in the 1850s carry forward to today, Swank said. Women were marginalized and trivialized then as now, she said, and flummoxed by a woman who could live successfully without a man.

“Mary Bee Cuddy can do it all without a man, but she doesn’t want to,” Swank said. “She is desperate for companionship, but the men around her all think she’s ‘bossy.’ The movie speaks to women’s universal desire to be independent and strong, yet still rely and share love with another person. How does a woman like that find a man who isn’t threatened, doesn’t feel emasculated by that?”

Swank was drawn to the role of a principled, pious woman, she said, because there are so few of them written for the big screen.

“It was extraordinary to bring a character to life who has morals and integrity, especially in this day and age, when doing the right thing seems like a quaint notion,” she said.

To prepare for the role, Swank had to learn how to ride a horse, drive a wagon and plow a field, leaning her whole body weight into a wooden plow while at the same time controlling two reined mules. Working with a legendary co-star/director was reminiscent of working with Clint Eastwood on “Million Dollar Baby,” she said. Jones was strict about sticking to the exact wording on the script, she said, even at one point instructing one actor to utter a sigh seven, not six times, to match the way the scene was written.

“He had an ear for the rhythm of the dialogue; he knew precisely what he was looking for — emotionally and acoustically — and how to pull it out of someone,” she said.

Swank hopes to direct a movie one day, although she doesn’t have a current story in mind.

When asked what her co-star learned from her during their collaboration, Swank thought for a moment:

“Maybe he’d like to know how I bake my pies,” she said. “Other than that, there’s not much that Tommy Lee Jones learned from me.”