Rating: R | Runtime: 107 minutes
Release Date: April 7th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Kelly Reichardt
Writer(s): Jonathan Raymond & Kelly Reichardt

I’d really like to take a shower.

I could feel the procrastination in my bones. Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is too busy finishing the sculptures for her show (happening in seven days) to bother sending out invites. Jo (Hong Chau) has agreed to participate in two shows simultaneously with work to finish and pieces to hang, but she comes back home to tie up a tire she found because she’s always wanted to put a swing in the yard of the two-home unit she bought that she and Lizzy share as landlord and tenant.

I was never as bad as some (one classmate used a soft drink cup as a mold the night before critique and barely had his BS straight to pretend the result held meaning), but crunch time was always when I wanted to work least. It’s also when I’m often at my most creative. Unfortunately for Lizzy, it might be when she’s at her most destructive.

Don’t expect ceramic smashing to the ground, though. Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is much too subdued for that (even if hers and Jonathan Raymond’s script flirts with the potential throughout). I mean destructive in the emotional sense since the moment Lizzy should be her most excited and anxious becomes the moment she’s at her most abrasively combative.

While a lot of that is self-inflicted—to distract herself with non-critical drama between friends, family, and coworkers—some is justified. Because it does seem like the people she wished supported her most (Maryann Plunkett as her mom/boss Jean, Judd Hirsch as her dad Bill, and John Magaro as her troubled brother Shawn) could honestly care less beyond hollowly conditional placation. It irks her so much that she can’t see those who are genuinely invested.

The result is a quiet comedy surrounding a high-strung introvert trying to be martyr and savior at once. She needs to “save” her father from houseguests and “save” her brother from himself. She must remind Jo that her paying job is that of a landlord who is obligated to fix her hot water regardless of how many art shows she has scheduled.

And she must do all that while finishing her own show and working full time at an art school where the latest artist-in-residence believes she’s nothing more than an office manager designing show flyers rather than a working artist herself. But that’s the price that must be paid in this world. Few garner the acclaim and status to survive on the work alone. Sometimes the doldrums of day job monotony threatening to derail everything can only be fought off by fabricated life-or-death nonsense.

Enter the thematic metaphors. A pigeon with a broken wing needing to be nursed, but perhaps not as much as Lizzy believes. A ceramic statue burned in an uneven kiln that exists as evidence of the beauty of imperfection and bane of expectation. How much of who Lizzy is stems from her desire to fix things outside of her control? How much from letting herself get too close to the flame?

We’re watching her push away allies and be ignored by those she loves—the weight of frustration and uncertainty placing her on the precipice of implosion. But no matter how dire things seem, it’s just art. Some people will like it. Others won’t. Until the moment it’s released into the world, however, it’s everything. Only afterwards can she return to the normalcy of “lower stakes” reality.

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(L-R) Michelle Williams and Hong Chau in SHOWING UP. Photo by Allyson Riggs, Courtesy of A24.