Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman glisten, but Charles Melton shines in a twisted tale of the ways we shape our realities, and the lengths we go to understand scandal.

In such films as Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, Velvet Goldmine and I’m Not There, filmmaker Todd Haynes has taken the stories of famous people and utilized what we know—or think we know—about them to explore ideas about celebrity and our all-consuming need to render their often-complex stories into straightforward narratives. That strange compulsion to explain, understand, and commodify the lives of real people is at the heart of his latest work, May December, and it certainly seems to have sparked something in him because the end result is the strongest work that he has done in quite some time. 

While those other films took musical icons (Carpenter, David Bowie, Bob Dylan) as their respective launching points, May December takes its inspiration from the strange case of Mary Kay Letourneau, the schoolteacher who startled the world in 1996 when it was discovered that she was having a sexual relationship with a 12-year-old student, later going to prison for (and marrying) him. It was a case that seemed tailor-made for the then-ascending tabloid TV culture and would inspire several documentaries, countless jokes on late-night television, and the inevitable TV movie.

For their film, Haynes and screenwriter Samy Burch have not specifically tackled the Letourneau saga for their film, though the parallels are unmistakable. Here, the focus is on Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), a woman whose life became fodder for the tabloids over two decades ago when she was caught having sex with 13-year-old Joe in the stock room of the pet store where they worked. After being released from prison, where she had Joe’s baby, the two married, had twins, and settled into what seems to be a normal and ordinary life. Still, Grace blithely ignores the occasional snide comments, while the now-adult Joe (Charles Melton) is discombobulated by the notion that he’s only 36 and yet his youngest kids are about to graduate high school.

That serenity is thrown into upheaval by the arrival of Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), a TV star who’s just signed on to play Gracie in an indie film based on her story. Ostensibly, Elizabeth is there to observe Gracie in her daily life as part of her process of figuring out how to play a character. In this case, her process also includes interviewing those involved in the story—from Gracie and Joe to the husband (D.W. Moffett) and family that Gracie left behind when she took up with Joe to the current owner of the notorious pet shop (where she does ask to see the stock room)—as a way of getting a fuller picture of the scope of the story.

However useful (and occasionally dubious) Elizabeth’s research may be for her preparation, it inadvertently exposes long-hidden fissures in Joe and Gracie’s relationship. Gracie is content in the notion that their relationship is a strong and stable union of two equals, and bristles at any suggestion otherwise (reverting to a lisp that grows more pronounced as she gets more upset). But Joe seems more willing to reexamine the relationship that would go on to dominate—and that is indeed the operative word—his life long before he became an actual adult.

As the film progresses, it becomes obvious that Haynes and Burch aren’t particularly interested in delving into the details of the Letourneau affair, but instead in trickier concepts: the public’s seemingly insatiable desire to reduce startling real-life stories to straight-line narratives without ever coming close to encompassing the feelings of everybody involved. Using an ambitious and often successful blend of piercing emotion and sly humor, the pair also examine what happened to those involved beyond the stuff in the headlines, especially the narratives they’ve constructed for themselves to justify the past.

In her fifth collaboration with Haynes, Moore delivers her strongest and chanciest performance in years, finding humanity in a character that most might dismiss as a monster without ever letting her off the hook for her bad behavior, then or now. (Some of the most shocking moments come from the way she just casually tosses off cruel comments to her children.) She maintains enough of an aura of mystery regarding Gracie so that we, like Elizabeth, can never quite get a read on her.

Portman is just as compelling as the actress trying to understand and explain Gracie’s behavior while maintaining secrets of her own. (She also features in perhaps the funniest sequence of Haynes’s oeuvre — Elizabeth hosts a Q&A with the drama class at the high school Gracie’s kids attend, one that quickly goes off the rails due to her apparent inability to read a room.) As Elizabeth begins to assume aspects of Gracie’s carefully cultivated personality as Gracie begins to lose them, the film suggest the Ingmar Bergman classic Persona, reconfigured for the TMZ age.)

However, the finest performance turns out to be from Melton, perhaps best known for his work as Reggie on the late, lamented Riverdale. He has the trickiest role—someone outwardly at peace with his past while suggesting discomfort the Hollywood outside stirs to the breaking point. He nails all of these conflicting emotions while more than holding his own against his powerhouse co-stars.

That said, those looking at May December hoping to find some explanation, even in fictional terms, for the Letourneau story will likely feel disappointed. This is a film that shows in penetrating, often funny and moving detail that even the most well-meaning of movies (and the brief clip that we see of Elizabeth’s movie suggests that it is not going to be one of those) can’t get to the real heart of such stories. Working as narrative and acerbic social critique, this is a high-wire act that never steps wrong for a second. The results are fascinating and compulsively entertaining. 

May December hits theaters November 17th before landing on Netflix December 1st.

May December Trailer: