A Rainy Day in New York: Plot, Cast, Ending & Where to Watch

Timothée Chalamet

Chalamet, filming between Lady Bird and Beautiful Boy, plays Gatsby in full Allen-protagonist mode — patrician slouch, dry voiceover, an undergraduate's affected weariness about a city he has barely left. The performance works because Chalamet plays the affectation as affectation: every cigarette is held a little too theatrically, every reference to Cole Porter is a costume choice. His scenes opposite Selena Gomez are where the role earns its keep; she punctures him and he is visibly relieved to be punctured.

Elle Fanning

Fanning plays Ashleigh as a wide-eyed Arizona-raised undergraduate whose interviewer's earnestness keeps tipping her into the path of every middle-aged film-world man the script can put in front of her. The performance is a screwball-comedy register — fast talk, hiccups when she is nervous, an inexhaustible willingness to be impressed — and Fanning calibrates it so that the joke is on the men who can't quite tell whether they are being seen or flattered.

Selena Gomez

Gomez is the film's secret weapon. Her Chan is the only character in the script who reads Gatsby clearly from the first scene, and Gomez plays the role with a wisecracking New York rhythm — eye-roll first, kindness underneath — that the writing alone doesn't quite earn. Her duet at the piano with Chalamet, late in the film, is the moment the picture quietly resolves; she is the version of Manhattan he was actually looking for, and the camera knows it before he does.

Jude Law

Law plays Pollard's longtime screenwriter as a man whose marriage is collapsing in real time during his car ride with Ashleigh through the rain — the screwball-comedy paranoid-husband role taken at full tilt. The performance is broad in the way the script needs it to be: Law turns a single afternoon of escalating jealousy into the film's most efficient running gag, and his second-act crash at a midtown hotel is staged with the precision of vintage Cary Grant.

Diego Luna

Luna takes the matinee-idol-movie-star part and plays it as a parody of the very seductive register he can supply without effort. His scenes opposite Fanning lean into the comedy of an internationally-famous star politely overestimating his own gravitational pull on a college sophomore from Tucson; Luna's underplaying of the role's vanity is what makes the seduction-attempt scene at his apartment land as a screwball beat rather than as discomfort.

Liev Schreiber

Schreiber plays the auteur-director Pollard as a man in the middle of a midcareer crisis, alternately confiding in Ashleigh, fleeing his own screening, and rewatching the rough cut of his new film at three in the morning. The performance is bruised in the way the Allen-by-way-of-Fellini directorial-stand-in role requires; Schreiber gives Pollard the kind of charisma that makes you understand why a college reporter would follow him through midtown and the kind of self-loathing that makes you understand why he wishes she wouldn't.