Natalie Portman, left, and Julianne Moore in May December (Film at Lincoln Center/Netflix)

Prickly, nuanced, and deliriously entertaining, Todd Haynes’s latest follows famed TV actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) as she goes to Savannah, Georgia, to research Gracie Atherton (Julianne Moore) for a forthcoming film. Twenty years ago, a thirtysomething Gracie began an affair with Joe (Charles Melton) when he was in middle school. The two are still together, although they are ostracized, living in a roomy house with their three children who are now college bound.

Elizabeth interviews Gracie’s past and present family, while numerously visiting Gracie to ask her questions and observe her actions. Elizabeth’s continuous mimicry of Gracie gradually builds into a scene of actorly transformation (in a bravura Bergman–inspired reading of one of Gracie’s letters to Joe) where Elizabeth conveys Gracie’s tics, register of voice, and emotional shadings.

All of this is subtly and delicately directed by Haynes and performed by Portman, in one of her most intricate performances. We watch Portman portraying Elizabeth who is portraying Gracie, and also portraying Elizabeth’s star persona. There is a slightly queasy, parasitic element to Elizabeth’s prying and pulling of Gracie’s life, from directly reviving an unsettled past to the imitating of Gracie’s make-up routine. Here, in one of the many striking uses of mirrors and thematic, visual nods to Bergman’s Persona, Gracie shows the products she uses and the way she applies them to her face, to which Elizabeth copies dutifully.

While many moments follow Elizabeth’s point of view, there are tangents with Gracie and Joe. The lurid tabloid story of their relationship has become achingly come down to earth: Joe is kind, altruistic, and intelligent, but emotionally and sexually stunted. Gracie is brittle and deeply insecure—sometimes lashing out in barbed, indirect ways, such as at her teen daughters’ weights. There is a sense of the love the two have for each other and their children, but also a deep unhappiness—but both lack an emotional maturity to ever seek lives out of their co-dependency.

Speaking with a childlike-lisp and acting blithely naïve in the public sphere, Gracie, played masterfully by Moore in a haunting turn, has a sunny disposition that morphs into racking, deep sorrow with Joe in the privacy of their own home. Even Moore’s arched eyebrow in Gracie’s mugshot, from when the scandal broke out, is a chilling rendering. Gracie runs a baking company out of the house, where she deduces the customers begrudgingly pity her. When one cancels an order, Gracie takes it personally, causing her to emotionally crumble. (She mentions throwing out a cake, which conjures what her character did in a pivotal moment in The Hours).

Most surprisingly, Melton, who is known for the teen series Riverdale, emerges with a disarming, extraordinarily deep, complex performance as his character becomes the film’s most sympathetic. Joe and Elizabeth are both the same age, 36, and there’s an almost unbearable sadness in thinking of the years Joe has lost without being able to go through a typical adolescence, especially as he watches his children embark on new lives for themselves. There’s also a very good performance by Cory Michael Smith as Gracie’s firstborn Georgie from her previous marriage, whose body language and actions infer off-kilter, emotional wounding.

If this story doesn’t lend itself to the rapturous cinematography found in Haynes’s work with cinematographer Ed Lachman, there is still a cloudy beauty to the lighting and visuals by cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt, Kelly Reichardt’s frequent collaborator. The quiet, unsettled, lamplit interiors are reminiscent of Haynes’s Safe. Marcelo Zarvos’s score utilizes a jolting motif from Michael Legrand’s 1971 The Go-Between (another film about forbidden relationship and an outsider). It’s noticeable, cinematic music that elevates and adds to the atmosphere, but also somehow creates both an engagement with and a relieving distance from the story.

The script, by Samy Burch and Alex Mechanik, is nonjudgmental, sharp, and peppered with sly humor—never wavering into the clichés of lurid true crime film adaptations. There’s a heavy butterfly and chrysalis metaphor that runs throughout, but it’s mostly subtly inferred, with a myriad of symbolisms. When we glimpse Elizabeth’s ultimate project, there’s a knowing sense of the limitations of filmmaking, especially when questing for truth—a person’s life can really never be wholly captured.

May December opened this year’s New York Film Festival, and was received warmly by the audience—who often laughed at its intrinsic dark humor. It opens in a few theaters on November 17 before streaming on Netflix, December 1.