Review: ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ dives into early ’90s New York, with struggling author trying to stay afloat

Marielle Heller’s second feature film, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” is an interesting companion piece (and mirror) to her debut, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl.” Both films are adaptations of women’s memoirs, and both carefully inspect the ways in which women navigate and survive with regard to their age and sexuality. As writers, the characters are aware of this, and aware of how they can create their own reality with their words.

While “Diary” followed a nubile young ’70s sex object, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” based on the book by author Lee Israel, adapted for the screen by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, is about an older queer woman, overlooked by society, creating her worth with her words using libertine and actually illegal methods. Lee Israel, played by Melissa McCarthy, is an author in early ‘90s New York struggling to make ends meet. Although she once had a New York Times best-seller, her agent (Jane Curtin) has no interest in her long-gestating Fanny Brice biography and writes Lee off because she’s not a “name” author like Tom Clancy or Nora Ephron.

Lee is too prickly and drunk to play well with others, and she finds herself in dire financial straits. When she sells off a personal note from Katharine Hepburn to Anna (Dolly Wells), a friendly bookshop owner and purveyor of rare literary memorabilia, Lee discovers her salvation: forgery. If her personal words have no value, she can ascribe them value by passing them off as someone else’s. Using a variety of vintage typewriters, she dashes off notes of cheeky witticisms, signing the names of Dorothy Parker, Nokl Coward and Marlene Dietrich, and sells them for top dollar to a network of dealers and collectors. The forgeries keep her rent paid and her cat fed, and she and her pal Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant) swimming in Scotch and sodas.

Jack is gay and homeless, and he seemingly subsists entirely on cigarettes, outsize charm and his ingratiating personality. He offers Lee friendship, and she offers him shelter. Together, they are each other’s life rafts, clinging to each other as individuals upon whom a capitalist culture doesn’t place much value upon and therefore forgets. To stay afloat, Lee takes on new identities, ones valued for their celebrity, to wring out enough cash to get by.

“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” exists on the margins of society, but Heller makes it a cozy world to inhabit nonetheless. It’s a galaxy of rare, old books stacked to the ceiling, of dive bars and red leather booths and brown liquor, tweed jackets and typewriters and answering machines with tapes. A moody, jazz-inspired score by Nate Heller skips and swoons dreamily throughout the best bookshops and boozy haunts of early ‘90s New York.

McCarthy is exceptional as the irascible Lee, and her skill in a dramatic role should be no surprise. Her performance is detailed, nuanced and subtly affecting, while Grant brings the relief as the tragicomic Jack, who showboats in circles around McCarthy, who’s in the straight man role for a change.

Although the title begs forgiveness, it’s laced with a sense of Israel’s signature biting sarcasm. Can you forgive her for trying? Can you forgive her for surviving? The real question is: Can she ever forgive us, for underestimating her worth?