Elle Fanning is sharp and affectionate in ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’

Twenty-eight-year-old Elle Fanning has been nominated for an Academy Award (Sentimental Value) and a Primetime Emmy (The Great) and has co-headlined a Disney flick that grossed three-quarters of a billion dollars (Maleficent). Yet, the role with which I instinctively associate her is her work as a backyard film “star” in J.J. Abrams’s 2011 thriller, Super 8. There, cast as the plucky child of troubled parents, the then-13-year-old was utterly convincing as a young woman on the brink of possibility or disaster. Though the timeline doesn’t quite fit, a grown-up version of that character could easily be the lead of Apple TV’s winning new show. 

Margo’s Got Money Troubles stars Fanning as Margo Millet, a doe-eyed coed lured into bed by predatory English prof Mark Gable (Michael Angarano). Seduced, like millions before her, by her lover’s bad poetry (“We are a hungry sheep on a green plane”), Margo falls helplessly into an