ELISABETH MOSS, OFTEN DRAWN TO portraying either vaguely or totally unlikable characters, has no vanity and no fear. In Josephine Decker’s Shirley, she plays a fictionalized version of eccentric, reclusive novelist and short-story writer Shirley Jackson—perhaps best known for her chilly 1948 groupthink parable “The Lottery”—and once again her instincts prevail. Her Jackson is a tyrant with cold, inquisitive eyes, her skin dotted with age spots, her tummy thickened with padding. Moss melts into this disguise like a poisonous but dazzling color-changing salamander, beckoning us for a closer look, if we dare.
Jackson died in 1965, at age 48, and Shirley, based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, takes place roughly within the last decade of her life. Eager, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his wife Rose (Odessa…