Do artists do the dishes? 'Showing Up' is about trudging through when life gets in the way

Does Martin Scorsese take out the garbage?

Does Banksy wash dishes?

We tend to think of artists as, you know, making art. It’s an understandable impulse; after all, most of us don’t know artists personally. Even for those who incorporate their lives into their work, we don’t know what their day-to-day existence is like.

“Showing Up,” Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, and her most-recent collaboration with Michelle Williams, brought the question to mind. Reichardt is asking much bigger questions about the artistic impulse and creativity than Scorsese’s trash cans, to be sure. But of its many brilliant aspects, the film does illuminate the numbing grind of real life when you’re trying to make art.

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Hong Chau plays another artist in the film

Lizzy (Williams) is not a famous artist. She is a sculptor who makes ceramic figures of women. We see her work, delicately (when she has to break off the arm of one of her small sculptures, she quietly says, “Sorry”), in her garage studio.

She’s trying to finish her pieces before an upcoming gallery show. But life often intrudes on her art. As in, seemingly, all the time. She rents from a neighbor and sometime friend named Jo (Hong Chau, who is never not great), with whom she’s miffed because she’s been without hot water for days. But Jo has two shows coming up and hasn’t had time to get the water fixed.

They bond over an injured pigeon — injured, unbeknownst to Jo, by Lizzy’s cat. Like so many seemingly small elements in Reichardt’s movies, the pigeon looms larger in the greater meaning of the movie.

Lizzy also works in the office at a Portland art college — for her mother Jean (Maryann Plunkett).

Free spirits come and go as Lizzy handles the grunt work, but it gives her access to the kiln, run by the ever-cheerful Eric (André Benjamin).

Jean is divorced from her husband Bill (Judd Hirsch), a potter; their marriage seems built on a kind of hippie-era aesthetic that faded long ago. Which is to say that when they run into each other, they take cheap shots.

Then there is Sean (John Magaro), also an artist, who is mentally ill. Jean dotes on him, sometimes at the exclusion of Lizzy, who handles the more day-to-day affairs of trying to keep Sean on track. Lizzy also worries about her father, flitting through life, though he seems happy enough. A couple of people he barely knows (Amanda Plummer and Matt Malloy) have shown up at Bill’s and stayed. “Hangers-on” is probably a too-kind description for then, certainly as far as Lizzy is concerned.

'Showing Up' is about how life can get in the way of art

Through it all, Lizzy seeks solace in her art, though the myriad distractions make it difficult to get to. She seeks it not in any grandiose, highfalutin way, but in a more down-to-earth, I-do-this-to-survive manner. In Williams’ do-a-lot-with-a-little depiction (she’s wonderful), Lizzy is frumpy, quiet — shy, even.

Yet she is always observant. Watch her eyes, taking in all that’s around her, as she says nothing. Maybe she’s gathering material for her art. Or maybe she’s just watching, trying to get from one moment to the next.

Maybe she’s just showing up.

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People say nothing happens in Reichardt's movies. They're wrong

I always feel compelled to defend Reichardt’s films from the complaint most commonly lodged against them — that nothing ever happens.

It’s absurd. No, an alien doesn’t snap his fingers and make half the world’s population disappear. But if you immerse yourself in the details that she so carefully and expertly observes, you grow to recognize how important seemingly small things are, how when cobbled together they form our whole lives.

Everything is important, in other words.

The film is a testament to my favorite kind of character, the ones who go about their lives in a one-foot-in-front-of-the-other manner. Lizzy is a prime example of this, trudging through the mundane aspects of life without (too much) complaint, working through, making her way eventually back down to the garage, where her art awaits.

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'Showing Up' 4.5 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Kelly Reichardt.

Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, André Benjamin.

Rating: R for brief graphic nudity.

How to watch: In theaters Friday, April 21.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Showing Up' movie review: The struggle is real for Michelle Williams