Lilian (Grace Van Patten) is indolent, indulged and enraging. And she is also utterly irresistible as a character in this angular comedy, written and directed by Dolly Wells (co-writer of the TV series Doll & Em). Van Patten delivers an exaggerated eye-roll of a performance as the feckless but engaging young woman whose gravy train of male support has finally ground to a halt. A new sense of purpose is launched through her relationship with her landlady, Julia Price (Emily Mortimer), a successful but aggressively reclusive writer and a friend of her late mother.
Uncomfortable, fidgety camera work captures Lilian’s uneasy blend of restlessness and apathy, a sense of being beached while the rest of life flows on without her. And Wells’s bracingly spiky writing vividly draws both the characters and the connections between them. Particularly fun is comedian John Early playing Sol, a mortifyingly accurate portrayal of the empty enthusiasms of hipster dilettantes everywhere.
