In an early scene in Todd Haynes’s May December, an actress named Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) is asked what drew her to a particularly controversial role, and her answer has the studied, airless polish of a phrase that has been memorized for easy repetition at a junket: “Well,” she says, smiling her broad, elastic smile, “it’s a very human and complex story.”

Haynes’s film is full of shots that depict women watching themselves, and each other, in mirrors, and it is extremely easy to imagine Elizabeth practicing this banal answer in one, too — rehearsing for her imminent performance in the press as a very human and complex artist, as opposed to an entirely craven opportunist whose ambition is her engine. Best known for her star-turn in a lowbrow television series about a veterinarian called, brilliantly, Norah’s Ark, she is convinced that this forthcoming “art house” film will finally win her critical acclaim; she also hopes that it will earn her the approval of her academic parents, who believe that acting is a job for stupid people.

In this instance, Elizabeth’s stupid-person job will see her embodying a bad one: Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), who became a tabloid bogeywoman in the ’90s after sleeping with, and then becoming pregnant by, a twelve-year-old boy named Joe. Now, Joe and Gracie live in Georgia, playing happy families, and Elizabeth has arranged to spend time shadowing Gracie, ostensibly so that she can better humanize her on-screen. That the experience will be profoundly dehumanizing for everyone involved is evident from the moment Haynes shows Gracie slowly opening the fridge, the score ratcheting to a shrill crescendo as if she might find something evil and unthinkable inside it, and then saying, flatly: “I don’t think we’re going to have enough hot dogs.”