Streaming Now: ‘Seberg’

“Seberg” opens with a glimpse of Kristen Stewart as Jean Seberg as Jeanne d’Arc, being literally burned at the stake on the set of Otto Preminger’s 1957 film, “Saint Joan.” This is the unsubtle prelude to the trials to come for the actress.

Based on the sad real-life happenings of Ms. Seberg, the plot begins with Jean leaving her indifferent husband Romain Gary (Yvan Attal) in Paris to fly to Los Angeles to work. At 35,000 feet, she meets Malcolm X acolyte Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) and raises her fist with him before the crowd of photogs on the tarmac. Soon thereafter she takes the long drive down from Coldwater Canyon to Compton where Jamal lives. They wind up in bed - unaware of the Feds in a panel van outside capturing every squeak in the mattress.

Bugging and wiretapping FBI agent Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) quickly grows obsessed with tracking Seberg’s every movement under the auspices of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO (a surveillance program meant to root our parlor pinks). For a while, Jean and Hakim run lines together, but the affair ends when it becomes clear the Feds are listening in on everything (and feeding tapes to Hakim’s wife Dorothy -- Zazie Beetz – who promptly unloads a pistol into Jean’s house).

The film wastes minutes on a needless B plot showcasing the lives of the Feds tracking Jean. We meet Jack’s wife Linette (Margaret Qualley), who’s studying to be a doctor, and dine with Jack’s racist partner Carl (Vince Vaughn), who hates his daughter because she has the same haircut as Jean.

The film fails to unpack why it is exactly that the actress breakfasts on whiskey most days. Is it the roles she’s offered? Is it the suspicious clicks she hears on the phone? And is she just a tourist in radical politics or truly committed to the struggle beyond writing checks?

Director Benedict Andrews ignores these questions and also breaks a cardinal rule: When you cast Kristen Stewart, you let her dominate the picture. She always elevates material, whether it’s mediocre (“Underwater”) or great (“Personal Shopper”).

Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse lard their tepid screenplay with stock phrases - characters tell Jean things like, “Watch your back,” “They’ll destroy you,” and so on. In the film’s best scene, Stewart wordlessly smokes a cigarette, alone in her mind with Seberg, and far away from this script.