Ari Graynor

In James Franco's The Disaster Artist (2017), Ari Graynor plays Juliette, an actress giving a poor performance, and makes the effort behind it count. There is a precise comic task here: recreate the awkward acting without suggesting that the person doing it is beneath consideration. We laughed at Graynor's bad acting because it still looks like somebody trying to get the scene right. That fits a film we liked for making incompetence funny without treating ambition as something shameful.

Comedy brought her wider notice through Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) and For a Good Time, Call... (2012), which she also executive-produced. It also encouraged the funny-friend casting that could limit what she was asked to do. The vulnerability beneath those free-spirited characters is the quality worth keeping, even when the characters themselves threaten to become familiar. Her starring role in I'm Dying Up Here (2017–2018) gave that emotional honesty more space, although drama was hardly new to an actor whose film debut was Mystic River (2003).

In Mrs. America (2020), she plays Brenda Feigen within an ensemble whose acting we admired. Dahvi Waller's series is intelligent and too tidy about its history, and our reservations concern that tidiness rather than the performers. Graynor's presence here is a useful corrective to the idea that the comic supporting roles define her. We would not call the dramatic work an improvement simply because it is dramatic; the comedy already needed her to make people believable.

Franco's film also provides a fair warning about what a supporting actor can accomplish. Graynor helps make its treatment of an awkward production humane, but she cannot supply the depth missing from its central friendship. We would like more parts that give her responsibility for the story and time to let the hurt register. Start with The Disaster Artist for the comic precision, and allow for a script that lets its subjects off too easily.