Diane

Film critic Kent Jones offers his first fiction film, the groundbreaking "Diane."

The movie is astonishingly simple, yet astounding. Mary Kay Place is remarkable as the core, a single woman navigating old age in a small New England town.

And she literally navigates from place to place, each scene bracketed by her driving the winding roads from her cousin Donna's (Deirdre O'Connell) hospital bed to lunches at unremarkable restaurants with her bestie Bobbie (Andrea Martin), and among her various appointments and disappointments. Diane is forever shopping, cooking, and caretaking, covering her loneliness with kindness, smothering regrets with groceries.

The piece is a quiet, yet riveting, portrait of current American life: Evangelical Christianity, healthcare, community. She and Bobbie serve food at a soup kitchen, dishing up what they regularly eat at their own meals. Diane is worried about her opiate-addicted son (Jake Lacy).

She tries journaling to organize the pieces of her life and to keep fragments from floating away as, one by one, folks leave her in various ways. Her struggle is striking and ordinary.

Estelle Parson also has an amazing turn as Aunt Mary, and the performances are uniformly stellar: Grounded, warm, wounded, witty, familiar. These are real people growing old, alternately angry, reflective, fearless and fearful. These are actresses inhabiting flawed females at the end of their lives. It's breathtaking.

Diane's friend Tom eats at the soup kitchen. She refused to let him help her clean up a pan of burgers she's dropped. He insists; she acquiesces.

He wonders why Diane, like his fondly-remembered aunt, wraps herself in shame and won't accept help.

He says, "Isn't it enough that I told you I wanted to help you?"

This is one of the profound meditations of the film – when are we helping, when are we hurting, when are we hiding? What makes a life and how do we sort it out at the end?

Writer/director Jones lays out a thought-provoking smorgasbord.

Diane is in theaters and video-on-demand on March 29: http://www.ifcfilms.com/films/diane