Seberg

It brings us no plea­sure what­so­ev­er to deliv­er the news that Seberg, a stilt­ed and slight biopic of the Iowa-born screen icon Jean Seberg, is some­thing of a train­wreck. Part of the prob­lem is the cast­ing of Kris­ten Stew­art in the title role – despite her best efforts, she is sim­ply unable to cap­ture the twin­kle-eyed spir­it of the soft-fea­tured, imp-haired star of films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less and Otto Preminger’s Bon­jour Tristesse.

If feels like we’re watch­ing Stew­art attempt­ing to insert her own per­sona into this sto­ry, and per­haps even pounce on the polit­i­cal­ly ripe mate­r­i­al to air some of her own (entire­ly valid) griev­ances with regard to pri­va­cy and the polit­i­cal lives of celebrities.

The time­line of the film cov­ers a brief sojourn Seberg spent in Hol­ly­wood at the behest of her agent, who was look­ing to cash-in on her dar­ling sta­tus in Europe and plant her into some quick­ie genre movies. She leaves her hus­band and son back in Paris and she boards a Pan-Am flight to Los Ange­les on which she meets the black pow­er activist Hakim Jamal (Antho­ny Mack­ie), and decides to dou­ble down on her pas­sion for donat­ing large sums of mon­ey to rad­i­cal polit­i­cal fac­tions fight­ing for equal­i­ty in America.

The sub­text to all this is that, per the estab­lish­ment, she’s open­ly fram­ing her­self as an ene­my of con­ser­v­a­tive white Amer­i­ca, so enter the FBI (Vince Vaughn and Jack O’Connell) and her pro­longed per­se­cu­tion at the hands of the suit­ed and boot­ed deputies of Uncle Sam.

The film mean­ders from scene to scene, with much of the dia­logue com­ing across as the actors mere­ly artic­u­lat­ing the themes or ref­er­enc­ing the cul­tur­al cli­mate of the era. There’s no real dra­mat­ic dri­ve, emo­tion or unex­pect­ed twists, no visu­al flour­ish­es or any for­mal inter­est beyond a vast array of impos­si­bly glam­orous costumes.