Her film credits include What Just Happened (2008), All Good Things (2010), Pawn Sacrifice (2014), Miss Stevens (2016), Golden Exits (2017), Vice (2018), Fractured (2019), and The Tender Bar (2021).

[6] Rabe was raised in Bedford, New York, but moved to Lakeville, Connecticut, when she was in seventh grade,[3] where she attended the Hotchkiss School.

She starred in two one-act plays, Speaking Well of the Dead by Israel Horovitz and The Crazy Girl by Frank Pugliese,[10] roles that enabled her to get an Equity Card.

From September 29 through October 2, 2004, she appeared in White Jesus by Deirdre O'Connor,[12] one of a series of one-act plays presented as The Democracy Project from the Naked Angels Theater Company.

[14] She made her Broadway debut as Annelle Dupuy-Desoto in the 2005 revival of Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling, directed by Jason Moore[15] for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award.

[17] From September through to October 2005, she appeared in the American premiere of Colder Than Here by English playwright Laura Wade at the MCC Theater,[18] prompting New York Magazine's Jeremy McCarter to call her performance "one of the best breakthroughs" of 2005.

[19] From September to December 2006, she played Ellie Dunn in Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw.

In August 2007, Rabe appeared in Crimes of the Heart at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, the directorial debut of actress Kathleen Turner.

[22] In August 2008, Rabe was cast as a plainclothes cop in the pilot of the HBO 1970s drama Last of the Ninth,[24] written by David Milch and directed by Carl Franklin.

From January to March 2009, she appeared in the Broadway premiere of Richard Greenberg's 1990 play The American Plan at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

[26] In 2010, she made her debut appearance at Shakespeare in the Park in a production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Daniel J. Sullivan, that ran from June 30 to August 1.

[33] Rabe appeared again at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in a production of A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen, where she played Nora Helmer.

[36] In 2019, for the ninth installment of the show, titled 1984, Rabe returned in the recurring role of Lavinia Richter, a distraught mother who haunts Camp Redwood, an idyllic summer retreat with a history of massacre.

Directed by Sam Gold, the cast included Alan Rickman, Jerry O'Connell, Hamish Linklater and Hettienne Park.

[38] In May 2013, she made her Los Angeles stage debut in Miss Julie by August Strindberg, adapted and directed by Neil LaBute.