Starring Mary Kay Place. Rated PG

As unassuming as its title, Diane is a character study centring on the kind of person movies usually ignore: an aging single woman who does her best for people around her but still seems to come up short in life’s sweepstakes.

Our title character is played by Mary Kay Place, herself a highly skilled comic actor, now 71, who didn’t get a real shot at stardom but never stopped working. The tart-tongued Oklahoman lent indelible support in The Big Chill and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, as well as more recent stints on Big Love, Lady Dynamite, and Grace and Frankie. Here, her lethally arched eyebrow is aimed at darker stuff, and she eschews the laughs as a small-town Massachusetts woman whose options are dwindling.

Lately, Diane has been dividing her time between working in a soup kitchen, visiting a beloved cousin (The Affair’s Deirdre O’Connell) dying of cancer, and checking up on her ne’er-do-well son. Played against type by Jake Lacy, who usually portrays Midwestern nice guys on shows like Girls, her Brian is a manipulative sometime drug addict always on the edge of getting it together. All of this leaves Diane caught between false hope and no hope. But the film’s tight writing and sure direction make you wonder if she ever had that much to believe in. There’s a spiritual dimension to her suffering—much of which takes place in her car—that is more existential than saintlike.

Diane’s bittersweet poetry is especially striking when you realize that this is writer-director Kent Jones’s first narrative feature, coming after a successful career making film-centred documentaries like Hitchcock/Truffaut and essays about Elia Kazan and lyrical horrormeister Val Lewton. Apart from the main story, Jones displays his love of actors by casting veterans like Estelle Parsons, Glynnis O’Connor, Joyce Van Patten, and Andrea Martin as members of Diane’s extended family. Here, in a world of fading dreams and fading flesh, everyone is lonely. But they sure make a lot of noise before they go.