From the rising tensions amid the make-or-break week of a Portland artist getting ready for a big show, filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff, First Cow) carves a profound, gorgeously layered portrait of a woman that is as much about what makes up a life as it is about making art.
Michelle Williams (The Fabelmans, Blue Valentine) shimmers with complexity as Lizzy, who is trying to hold things together when they keep trying to fall apart. Her hot water heater is busted, her brother might be going off the rails, her divorced parents are exasperating in their own separate ways, she’s surrounded by free spirits at the arts college where she works… and all this lies just below the raw surface of the work that feeds her soul.
As her show looms, the crucial question for Lizzy is can she continue to show up for others while also showing up for herself? The pleasure is that we get to see, from the inside, how Lizzy answers. Puncturing the tropes of movies about artists with its comic touch and excavations of how we become ourselves through others, Showing Up gets to something deeper and more personal.
