Played with a sharklike cunning and steadiness by Heather Burns, Nancy turns on the down-home charm, and McCrane, already wounded and searching for meaning, is like soft tissue in her oily hands. But she soon has a rival. At the funeral, McCrane runs into Essie, a cousin of indeterminate distance, and sparks fly. (We are in Tennessee now, after all.) Essie is an angelic foil to Nancy’s scheming; blonde and guileless, she is a kindergarten teacher resistant of Strings’s celebrity rather than enthralled by it. In a tender performance by Adelaide Clemens—who, it must be said, bears an uncanny resemblance to Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea heroine, Michelle Williams—Essie is a calm port to Strings’s storm. They naturally have a drunken one-night stand.
To atone, McCrane hastily proposes to Nancy, and it would appear she’d got her man—though not before Nancy confronts Essie in a gripping scene of bless-your-heart dueling, that delicious specialty of the Southern woman brilliantly evoked by Lonergan here.
Buzzing around McCrane’s many affairs, both personal and professional, is his pathologically obliging and ever-present assistant, Jimmy. He is the one who must ring the avant-garde German film director with whom Strings is filming a space movie to pause production (which he does in perfect German), while also keeping a lid on his boss’s messy love life, and don’t forget the dry cleaning! Jimmy sniffed out Nancy’s act from the start, and it is fun watching the loyal yes-man and the crafty adventuress spar. It is also through Jimmy that we observe the absurdity of life as a modern celebrity (or the “third-biggest crossover star in the history of country music,” more specifically). With a toady at his disposal to do anything that makes him even mildly uncomfortable, it’s no surprise Strings feels out of touch.
