The other supporting actors are hamstrung by playing thinly drawn archetypes, but Laurence Boxhall, as Tilly's sometime boyfriend, brings an honesty and sweetness to his part.
Elaine Stritch, the theatrical force of nature who died on Thursday at 89, was a foul-mouthed New York legend who seemed to deliver her best performances when she was playing thinly veiled versions of her irascible self.
"He's not playing a thinly veiled version of himself," Mark Duplass said.
Here, at the pinnacle of her first period of stardom (and in her last film before the enforcement of the Production Code would rein in her complicated sexuality), she is already playing a thinly disguised version of herself, which readers of the fan magazines would have recognized immediately.
In the interim he had a great success playing a thinly disguised version of the American actor John Barrymore in Edna Furber's Theatre Royal.
Kristen Stewart co-stars as mercurial Marylou, while Viggo Mortensen is purely glorious playing a thinly-veiled William Burroughs, the trio's wise but wonky mentor.
Lohan, who as far back as 2009 was in talks to play a thinly veiled version of her troubled starlet self in producer Richard O'Sullivan's film 'One Night With You,' may be in danger of losing the part thanks to her latest troubles, Richard Johnson's Flash reports in The Daily (iPad-only).
The escalating GOP counterinsurgency against him is fueled by playing on the thinly veiled racial fears of a black liberal leaning president.
Inside the tent, on the screen, Gérard Depardieu plays a thinly-veiled Dominque Strauss-Kahn, who is arrested for sexual assault and made to go buck-naked for his strip search at the prison.
Sean Bean will play a thinly-veiled version of his Game of Thrones role, Ned Stark, in E4's bong shop comedy, Wasted, while Kevin Eldon, who played a comedy Ned in the HBO series' play within a TV show, will co-star in Jo Brand's Channel 4 social worker sitcom, Damned.
Yes, he's dealing with a drinking problem, but all that ends up doing is give him the shadings of an arc, unlike poor Octavia Spencer, reduced to wincing and mugging on the sidelines, playing a character so thinly-sketched that she and her entire oversized brood feel like they escaped from a sitcom.
