Jessica Lange as an Actress with Dementia

In “The Great Lillian Hall,” Jessica Lange plays a veteran theater actress — a legend of the Broadway stage — who is always putting on airs, reciting bits from her favorite roles, and carrying on in the tradition of fabled actresses who get known for playing characters like Blanche DuBois because they’ve actually got a lot of Blanche in them. (They believe their own illusions.) Yet just because Lillian Hall is a flamboyant grand dame doesn’t mean that she’s not showing you who she is. Lange, a beauty at 75, has a face that has only grown more expressive with the years. In “The Great Lillian Hall,” that face is a map of emotion we read. Even when Lillian is being deceptive (even when she’s deceiving herself), the majesty of her feelings shines through.

There’s a moving scene in which Lillian is seated on a porch with her adult daughter, Margaret (Lily Rabe), who she never had time for when she was raising her; she was always acting, doing eight performances a week. At night, though, she would come home in time to sing the young Margaret to sleep, and now, on the porch, she gently sings that same song — “Hush little darling don’t you cry…” Her voice is old now, and it cracks, and what we see and hear in Jessica Lange, expressed in emotions as delicate as parchment, are three levels of awareness: an ache of nostalgia; the regret Lillian now feels over what an absent mother she was; and something new — a quiet chasm of sadness…