Starlet

In the sun-saturated San Fernando Valley, adult-film star Jane, a.k.a. Tess Steele (Dree Hemingway), hits the jackpot when she discovers several thousand dollars inside a thermos purchased at an elderly woman’s yard sale. After splurging on accessories and a manicure, Jane—racked by guilt—offers to assist the old widow, Sadie (Besedka Johnson), with shopping and other chores. Sensing a disruption of her comfortable solitude, Sadie tries fending off Jane’s overtures of friendship, but each gradually find in the other the loving relationship missing from their lives. As the pair’s mother-daughter bond deepens, however, Jane risks alienating her friend, roommate, and colleague Melissa (Stella Maeve). Once again focusing on those at the margins of society and capturing the details of an overlooked profession, director Sean Baker elicits revelatory performances from Hemingway (daughter of Mariel and great-granddaughter of Ernest) and the eighty-five-year-old Johnson (in her first and only screen role) for a profound, comic, and beautifully crafted story about the possibility of connection in a world of artifice and isolation.