After crafting a number of compelling film history-related documentaries (not to mention heading up the New York Film Festival), writer-director Kent Jones made his narrative feature with the tender character study Diane. Executive produced by Martin Scorsese and starring Mary Kay Place, the story of a woman questioning her life picked up the top prize at Tribeca Film Festival (among other places), and will now arrive in March via IFC Films.
John Fink said in his review, ‘The narrative directorial debut of film scholar, curator, and documentary filmmaker Kent Jones elicits an awful lot of anticipation. Often, first features contain raw emotions and boundless pent-up ideas often toned down in future efforts. Diane, written and directed by Jones–known for his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, along with his previous theatrical feature which aimed to recapture the spirit of Hitchcock/Truffaut’s conversations by engaging with the best filmmakers working in contemporary cinema–is an observant and nuanced dramas which feels closer to the emotional truths of Kenneth Lonergan and Angus MacLachlan than the formal flair of Scorsese and Hitchcock.”
Also starring Jake Lacy, Andrea Martin, Estelle Parsons, Deirdre O’Connell, Joyce Van Patten, Phyllis Somerville, Glynnis O’Connor, and Paul McIsaac, see the trailer and poster below.
For Diane (Mary Kay Place), everyone else comes first. Generous but with little patience for self-pity, she spends her days checking in on sick friends, volunteering at her local soup kitchen, and trying valiantly to save her troubled, drug-addicted adult son (Jake Lacy) from himself. But beneath her relentless routine of self-sacrifice, Diane is fighting a desperate internal battle, haunted by a past she can’t forget and which threatens to tear her increasingly chaotic world apart. Built around an extraordinary, fearless performance from Mary Kay Place, the narrative debut from Kent Jones is a profound, beautifully human portrait of a woman rifling through the wreckage of her life in search of redemption.
Diane opens in theaters and on VOD on March 29.