She’s mostly in my spot. The cool, clumsy, catty person who is in the middle of a deeply personal, isolating emotional crisis she tells no one else abut. Watching her go from one such role to another in a series of movies has given me so much hope, respite. A place to pause and breathe. Catherine Keener often plays these bourgeois, slightly artistic, mostly introverted people who are like me, you and someone we all know. There’s a strange zest she brings to each of these roles, infusing them with a humanity that’s otherwise relegated only to the lead roles.

Through her films, I see women who are far from perfect. Adrift, alienated, cold. Keener seems to play them from a place of deep empathy, almost as if she learned the place they come from. Watching her be them is like observing a time capsule from a person’s life, peering into their living room without their knowledge on any given day and coming back soaked in a whiff of their persona. Keener populates my American filmic universe with women of varied anxieties, single mothers sitting on stoops, clumsy muses and women in repose.