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Factory Girl rolls off the assembly line.

by Shaun Brady

It's a tragic, all-too-common story: the starry-eyed quest for glory sabotaged by sordid reality; a pampered child of wealth unable to separate artistry from fame, forsaking the former for the hollow rewards of the latter.

LITTLE MISS S.: Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Poor little Harvey Weinstein.

Still, any parallels between Weinstein and Edie Sedgwick are as superficial as Factory Girl's portrayal of its subject. The film was troubled long before Harvey's Oscar-sniffing dogs dug their teeth into the project: Sienna Miller, whose portrayal of Sedgwick is the film's sole virtue, was replaced by a financier-mandated Katie Holmes and eventually reinstated after Holmes' date with Scientological destiny.

Under normal circumstances, the reported reshoots and rush to the year-end nomination deadline would leave a film scarred, but George Hickenlooper's biopic is such a muddle from beginning to end that it's hard to see the seams for the debris.

The problems are fundamentally rooted in the script by Captain Mauzner (aka Josh Klausner, who previously dredged the muck for the 2003 John Holmes flick Wonderland), which offers far less insight into Edie Sedgwick than any of Andy Warhol's unblinking celluloid portraits. Mauzner's interpretation of Sedgwick begins and ends with the poor little rich girl sobriquet, tracing her short life with little more than CliffsNotes Freud and biopic cliches.

A bored socialite who falls in with a chic artistic community only to succumb to drugs, jealousies and rumors, Sedgwick today would be fast-tracked to her own reality show, but what makes her more interesting than your average Paris Hilton are the times and the crowd that she ran in. Unfortunately, Hickenlooper depicts both with a pedestrian eye, transforming Warhol's vibrant Factory into a theater club after-party.

Guy Pearce's barely human Warhol is fun to watch as long as you can ignore what a stick-figure slander he is on the artist himself. The script, never particularly rigorous about its facts, draws a reductionist opposition between the shallow, self-absorbed celebrity culture embodied by Warhol and the profound political idealism represented by Sedgwick's alleged relationship with Bob Dylan.

Actually, Hayden Christensen is billed as "The Musician" thanks to a threatened lawsuit from Dylan. (It's saying something when a portrayal affronts his integrity even after the Victoria's Secret ad.) The name change was hardly necessary, given that Christensen's mumbling performance is more New Christy Minstrels than Blonde on Blonde. The rumors about his infamous sex scene with Miller seem even more like desperate attention-seeking after you've seen it; if there was any real action happening, the Skinemax-level fireplace-and-wine-glass scene means that either Hickenlooper is thoroughly unable to capture actual heat on camera, or these two are just really boring between the sheets.

Like Peter Bogdanovich before him, Hickenlooper is a junkie for Hollywood tales, and his documentary interrogations of that world have shown insight. But his narrative work has failed to capture any reflected glory — his film of Orson Welles' unproduced screenplay, The Big Brass Ring (1999), is the TV-movie antithesis of Welles' visual flair. Perhaps it's unsurprising that Hickenlooper manages to make this fascinating conglomeration of characters such a dull slog, but that doesn't make it any less of a disappointment.

(s_brady@citypaper.net)

Factory Girl

Directed by George Hickenlooper

A Weinstein Company release