Starlet (2012)

Jane (Dree Hemingway) seems to be something of a slacker, a gorgeous young blonde who lives with two stoner videogame playing housemates, Mikey (James Ransome) and Melissa (Stella Maeve). One day to relieve the boredom Jane sets out around the San Fernando Valley with her little dog Starlet to hit yard sales. We see her in a montage picking up various useless items, including a huge floral thermos that Jane wants to make into a vase. We don't really have much of a sense of who Jane, Mikey and Melissa are, other than seemingly unambitious twentysomethings, but we start to get a clue in an interesting scene relatively early in the film when Jane is in the kitchen attempting to clean the thermos while Melissa arrives back from a still undefined workplace in hysterics. Jane really isn't paying that much attention to the drama unfolding in the background because she's shocked to discover that a lot of money has been stuffed into the thermos in neat little rubber banded rolls.

Jane almost immediately goes on a spending spree, getting goodies for herself and for Starlet, but ultimately her conscience gets the best of her, and she tries to return the thermos to the elderly lady from whom she bought it, but the woman simply cuts her off with a curt "No refunds!", leaving Jane to contemplate her next move. She follows the elderly woman one day when the woman takes a cab to the grocery store. Jane runs to the cab and pays him off, and then magically "shows up" offering to drive the old woman home. Thus begins a highly unusual and awkward relationship where it even takes Jane a while to learn that the old woman's name is Sadie (Besedka Johnson). Sadie is a rather crusty old broad, not especially glad to have a newfound companion seemingly stalking her, and things get even worse when Jane shows up to Sadie's weekly excursion to a church bingo game. An ensuing melée with some concerned police officers at least has the upshot that Sadie figures out—perhaps incorrectly—that Jane is only trying to be nice and supposedly has no ulterior motives.

The rest of the film plays out in small character driven moments between Jane and Sadie, as well as between Jane and Melissa. Without spoiling one of the major plot points that occurs surprisingly late in the film, it turns out Jane and Melissa work for the same company in an industry for which the San Fernando Valley is somewhat infamous. Melissa, however, has discovered Jane's stash of bucks and has a few ideas of her own. One of the most interesting things about Starlet is how discursive all of these elements are, with the one notable exception of the "reveal" (an appropriate term, for those who can read between the lines) regarding Jane's nascent career. We're really not privy to that much information about either Sadie or Jane, and yet both characters are fully formed and very believable.

Anchoring the film are two remarkable women, the young Dree Hemingway (who looks kind of like a cross between Gwyneth Paltrow and Bridget Fonda) and an elderly newcomer by the name of Besedka Johnson, a senior citizen who in typically unpredictable Hollywood fashion was "discovered" when she was 85 while she was swimming laps in a YMCA and suddenly found her long ago dreams of being an actress a reality. (Johnson sadly passed away just a few weeks ago at the age of 87.) Hemingway and Johnson play beautifully off of each other, and as the relationship grows, there's some real heartfelt emotion that reaches through the screen and will touch all but the most hardened viewer. Jane's slow realization of what is right is what drives the film, but Sadie's own crusty shell gives the film its bitter edge.