It really is the fridge inventory moment that sets the dizzying standard of delightful discombobulation that Todd Haynes’s May December will meet time and time again over its next two hours or so. Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is feeling apprehensive about the visit of Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman) to her family’s backyard barbecue. Against a heavily dramatic music score composed by Marcelo Zarvos (adapting music Michel Legrand wrote for the 1971 film The Go-Between), Gracie swings open the door of her familiar household appliance and placidly frets that they will not have enough hot dogs to satisfy the teeming group of people gathered out on the back lawn. It is the plainest of observations presented with the most florid cinematic goosing imaginable. Haynes has regularly demonstrated that he knows how to bend the tonal contours of film narrative into piquant pretzels, and the devilish comic beat of the kitchen-based assessment is the opening gambit to his most daring, playful outing yet. Before he’s done, a walk through a pet store store stock room will proceed with the foreboding of a menacing horror film, and gentle family drama will be steeled with the tension of a psychological thriller.

If Haynes were merely toying with tone and form, May December could quickly become flattened by its affect. Instead, the inherent artificiality that arises from calling attention to cinematic tricks, a tactic that extends back at least as far as the heights of the French New Wave, serves to elucidate the film’s points about the predatory cultural instincts that commodify the sensationalized pain of people who have gotten themselves in scandalous trouble. Samy Burch’s screenplay (she shares a story credit with Alex Mechanik) is transparently drawn from real-life instances of teachers entering into sexual and romantic relationships with children, and the film’s story goes after the lurid fascination the general populace has for such affairs like someone helpless scratching at a slow-healing scab. The introduction of an actress hoping to study the enduring relationship that Gracie has with the boy who has grown to be a man and her husband (Charles Melton) to inform her planned performance in a docudrama further indicts filmmakers who mine misery for entertainment. Presumably, Haynes, who first gained wide attention from an experimental film about Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia, isn’t absolving himself.

A film this reliant on balancing its divergent sensibilities requires actors who can calibrate their performances with millimeter-fine precision, and that’s exactly what Haynes has, particular in the main three roles. Julianne Moore shows how Gracie’s vulnerability is a thin skin over seething resentment and a capacity for exerting harshly manipulative control, and Melton is a wounded, lost soul — in many ways, he’s still stuck in the boyhood that was robbed from him — whose self-protective passivity is undone by the interloper who stirs the questions that he previously dared not ask. Portman is best of all, artfully revealing layers of curiosity and cunning that pile up into an artist who mistakes mimicry for empathy. Every last one of them understands their place in the Haynes’s scheme and strengthens his intertwined theses through the deep ingenuity of their performances. May December has a grand vision, and the actors are instrumental to helping Haynes make that vision whole.