Ari Graynor

Comic actors who can also hold still are rarer than they should be. Graynor turned up on The Sopranos in 2001 and in Mystic River two years later, then spent the back half of the 2000s becoming the person directors called when a scene needed someone to detonate in it: Caroline in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, Eva Destruction in Whip It, Lacey in Youth in Revolt, Marisa in The Sitter.

The drunk best friend is normally a prop. She plays it as a person having a genuinely terrible night, which is the difference between a bit and a performance, and it is why those films still get watched. For a Good Time, Call gave her an actual lead in 2012 and proved she could carry a picture; the industry did not do much with the information. The Disaster Artist put her in the strangest position on her resume, playing the actress playing Lisa, a joke that only lands because she performs it with total sincerity.

The other half of the career is much darker and much less seen. An American Crime, in which she plays a real participant in a true-crime case, is close to unwatchable in the intended way. Cassie Feder in I'm Dying Up Here is a comic being ground down by the club circuit. Brenda Feigen in Mrs. America and the defense attorney Leslie Abramson in Monsters are both real women who talked for a living, and she plays talking as work. She has been the best thing in more films than she has led.