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With Mary Bronstein’s Yeast debuting on DailyMotion tonight, and Joe Swanberg’s Nights and Weekends opening this weekend at the IFC Center, the two SXSW 2008 premieres starring Greta Gerwig will suddenly become available to a non-festival audience simultaneously. When I heard this was going to happen, I dug up some of the press Gerwig has garnered over the past year, most of it pegged to her appearance in the Duplass brothers’ Baghead. I quickly noticed a trend: Gerwig has been covered exhaustively by male writers who a) have a tendency to label her an “ingenue” or an “‘it’ girl“, and b) devote much column space to the question of whether or not Gerwig’s main talent is playing herself.

Certainly, the great success of Hannah Takes the Stairs, the highly improvised project on which the pixie-cute actress collaborated with Swanberg and friends, is that it parts of it seem so lacking in cinematic artifice, they can play as glimpses into lives in progress. But if Hannah seems real enough to reach through the screen and touch, Gerwig’s title character is too exasperating to make that a particularly attractive proposition (or maybe not: almost like a classic femme fatale, it’s hard to deny her appeal even as she’s leaving you for your best friend). So when in Baghead, she plays a pixie-cute actress collaborating with friends on a highly improvised project––who drinks too much, takes little convincing to remove her top, and ultimately ends up with the funny, schlubby nerd––it seems too coincidental to be fiction, and apparently too cute to resist.

Gerwig hasn’t resisted the suggestion that the roles she plays grow out of who she is, but Nights and Yeast add two disparate but fully realized characters to her repertoire. Yeast is, for some, an endurance exercise; for me, it’s a comedy, and on the contrary, it’s the comparatively gentle but fundamentally flawed Nights and Weekends (on which Gerwig is billed as co-writer/director alongside Swanberg, and co-producer alongside Swanberg, Anish Savjani and Dia Sokol) which tries patience. If the latter shows Gerwig pushing a character way beyond adorable, it often feels like an exhausting exercise for all involved. It’s her work as Yeast’s only semi-relatable comic relief that throws up a middle finger at the ingenue concept, literally.

I’ve written a great deal about Yeast and don’t want to rehash too much of my previous ramblings here. But watching the film this week for the first time in months, it was impossible to ignore the lack of vanity amongst all three actresses. In a film with concerns about as far as you can get from the bedroom-bound romantic roundelays associated with the M-word, Gerwig’s crunchy Gen is sweaty and zitty and nothing at all like the DIY sweetheart at the center of so many Arts & Culture profiles. Both a catalyst for the film’s girl-on-girl violence and the only character in the film who seems to be a stone’s throw away from the ability to be civil, Gen’s vacant smile is both compelling and really unsettling. Punctuating sentences with a Butthead-like “heh”, Gen’s grin never fully matches up with her ping-ponging eyes.

Those who want to stick to their perception of Gerwig as the quirky, if frequently topless, object of desire would best be advised to stick to Nights and Weekends. Or would they? Though both Swanberg and Gerwig cross nudity off the checklist in the first scene, Gerwig spends much of the first third of this naturalistic long-distance relationship drama cast in the role of insecure shrew. Her Mattie, a New York-based nursing student who visits boyfriend James (Swanberg) in the depths of a Chicago winter, waste precious nestling time needling, a bad, nervous habit which hits its zenith with the shriek, “I don’t respond to sarcastic fun!” Mattie’s obsession with controlling every moment feels unnatural, and Gerwig’s plays it with unexpected affectations, her voice snapping quickly from deep mumble to high-pitched sing-song of doom.

I’ve seen the film twice now, and both times I’ve struggled to find a way in until almost half-way through. I now think it’s because Gerwig doesn’t ever seem to play to her expected strengths until about thirty minutes in. By this time, the action has jumped to New York, and Mattie is dead scared, apparently both of losing James and of being bonded to him for life by a baby. In the midst of a conversation between James and Mattie about the sincerity of “I love yous”, the camera settles on a reaction shot of Gerwig, her pupils drifting off into the corners of her eyes. At this point, the actress seems to suddenly yank the reigns of a film that just a moment earlier felt as if it was to floating without direction, and demands that we pay attention. We come to realise that the first section of the film feeds into an incredibly delayed punchline: the pattern of conflict that Gerwig and Swanberg set up at the start and then leave behind eventually pays off, but it doesn’t really happen until Night’s final ten minutes. I’m not sure if the wait is ever made all the way worth it, but it’s ameliorated by Gerwig’s performance in the film’s final scenes, in which Mattie temporarily gives up control, and then, suddenly and rather spectacularly, reclaims it.