When attending film festivals like Cannes, I’ve always wondered about the filmmaker anticlimax. Here’s a movie you’ve labored over and tinkered with for months, years, maybe even decades. And then, suddenly, it is out in the world to be tangled with, embraced, or dismissed. A rave must feel great. A pan has to hurt. But what of the far more common in-between experience: the friendly nods of recognition, the wan words of approval. And that’s it?

Last year, the busy and big-hearted Tick, Tick... Boom considered that kind of aftermath, a musical composer’s workshop going well but not moving the needle on anything. Now, at this year’s Cannes, there is Kelly Reichardt’s quiet and lovely film Showing Up, about the world of artists, those who pick-pick-pick at their passions with only the faith that it will mean something somewhere down the line. Often, it merely slips into existence without much recognition.

Michelle Williams, long a muse of Reichardt’s, plays Lizzie, a sculptor who pays her bills by working in administration at a Portland, Oregon arts college. Her mom is her boss; Jo (Hong Chau), who appears to be her closest friend, is more successful and also her landlord. Lizzie’s peers and loved ones exist above her in some diffuse hierarchy, her only real autonomy seeming to come from her lonely, meticulous work crafting clay into figures of women in motion. 

Reichardt, a professor at Bard, is herself ensconced in academia, and she brings a wry, knowing eye to Showing Up’s depiction of the freedom and tedium of the incubator. A competitive spirit murmurs in every room, but never quite drowns out the collegial encouragement. It’s a furnace, but it’s set to low. While Reichardt does certainly poke some light fun at a version of her own milieu—note the two characters wearing Crocs in the same scene; observe the beat-up Subaru station wagon, the chunky jewelry and loose pants—there is also a deep, if gently stated, affection for these spaces and all they allow.

Throughout Showing Up, we see students at work on their craft, filming or painting or weaving or moving un-self-consciously out on the lawn, feeling the vibes. What a special place, the film says with a watery sigh of appreciation. Reichardt knows that it’s vexing, sure, to be an adult perpetually stuck in this staging room other people glide through. But she also recognizes that, on the best of terms, the creative spirit can be contagious—or, at least, sustaining.

Not much happens in Showing Up. Lizzie is preparing for a small show at a local gallery and stresses about that. She tangles with Jo over a broken water heater; she worries about her somewhat addled brother, Sean (John Magaro). Jo saves a pigeon that’s been attacked by Lizzie’s cat and then blithely leaves the broken bird in Lizzie’s care. This helpless little creature is surely the film’s chief metaphor, a small and anonymous thing tended to with mounting intention until it is, both ceremoniously and not, released into the world to live on its own. The bird is a film; the bird is a sculpture; the bird is any other thing that someone has been hopeful or foolish enough to foster into being. Maybe that analogy is a little on the nose, but sometimes good art is just that. 

I’d have to imagine that Showing Up is a deeply personal project for Reichardt, a mulling over of her own creative process just as last year’s exquisite Bergman Island was for Mia Hansen-Løve. Williams, ever loyal to Reichardt, lends capable hands of support. She gives good prickliness—Lizzie is no saintly dreamer battered by a harsh world—but softens just when a real person might, when they realize that the indignant frustration probably isn’t worth it. Williams’s performance—nicely complemented by Chau’s not-quite-villainous blitheness—is about as natural as can be, fluid but purposeful as Lizzie makes her meandering way toward her big day.

When that day arrives—all of Lizzie’s lovely little sculptures arrayed on a single pedestal (that’s it! For all that work!)—it comes with the expected jumble of nerves and nuisances. Sean is eating too much cheese. Lizzie’s divorced parents (Judd Hirsch and Maryann Plunkett) get to bickering. A potential opportunity arrives in the form of a New York gallerist, but we’ve no idea what becomes of that. It is, in the end, just another day—albeit one in which Lizzie’s output has finally left its nest. Which is its own kind of triumph, one that Lizzie—and all artists, one hopes—might revel in, before it’s back to yet another lump of clay, waiting to be formed into something remarkable if only for its existence.