Laura Dern is such a child of Hollywood that she can trace her conception to a movie set: “The Wild Angels,” the Roger Corman biker flick that starred her parents, the actors Bruce Dern and Diane Ladd, in 1966. The couple split up when Dern was two, and she grew up amid the chaotic, creative ferment of seventies cinema, when Hollywood was embracing off-kilter actresses such as Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Dern’s mother, who died on Monday, at the age of eighty-nine. In Martin Scorsese’s “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” in which Ladd plays a diner waitress, the seven-year-old Dern wound up as an extra at the counter, for which she had to eat nineteen ice-cream cones. As her own career took off, in the eighties, Dern (with her mother’s help) attained legal emancipation so that she could work more hours. At seventeen, she moved into her own apartment (her roommate, somehow, was Marianne Williamson) and dropped out of U.C.L.A. after two days to star in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” as a sunny suburban teen sitting atop a world of horrors.
What Lynch saw in her was an innate incandescence that has propelled her through the decades, whether she’s outwitting dinosaurs (“Jurassic Park”) or bringing down a corporation (“Enlightened”). Perhaps because she’s a daughter of the New Hollywood, an era when art had a tenuous edge over commerce, Dern has always made unorthodox choices. In the nineties, instead of following up “Jurassic Park” with the blockbusters on offer, she starred in Alexander Payne’s abortion satire, “Citizen Ruth,” and helped Ellen DeGeneres come out as gay on her sitcom. (Dern was so besieged by death threats that she had to hire security.) That independence of spirit fed her longevity. The year she turned fifty, she was everywhere: reuniting with Lynch on “Twin Peaks: The Return,” playing a California power mom on “Big Little Lies,” and commanding a rebel spaceship in “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” Not long after, she won an Oscar for her movie-stealing role as a divorce lawyer in Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story.” At the 2020 Spirit Awards, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles sang a paean to her.
Some have called it the Dernaissance. Whatever it is, it shows no sign of abating. In Baumbach’s newest film, “Jay Kelly,” which comes out this week, Dern is a publicist who works for the title character, an aging matinée idol played, with self-referential suavity, by George Clooney. Next month, in Bradley Cooper’s “Is This Thing On?,” she and Will Arnett star as a married couple whose breakup is complicated when the husband takes up confessional standup comedy. In both films, Dern combines big-hearted openness with something more self-protective and disillusioned; there may be no actress better at conveying a woman’s yearning for freedom despite the maddening obstacles the world throws in her path. I met Dern over lunch, as the two movies were playing at the New York Film Festival. This was several weeks before her mother’s death,