sharp Ange Mlinko on Altman, Keillor, and the Suicide Poet Girl

"Sure enough, as the story unfolds, Lola Johnson devolves into a series of incoherent stereotypes. She is not our sharp observer, just one of the ensemble. She isn't a rebel, she's Mama's little girl tearing up when someone else dies backstage and she's told the show must go on. There will be no critique of the Prairie Home Companion, or Keillor, or Meryl Streep's pink shawls. There is, instead, another cliche rearing its head: the cliche of the Interchangeable Starlet, who serves no earthly purpose in a film besides eye candy.

Reader, this is the part when I became the teenage suicide girl: contorting in my seat, drawing up my knees, playing with my hair, tilting my head, and sighing loudly, squashing my cheeks. I was bored out of my skull..."