Biopic tells vacuous tale of Warhol’s muse

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, February 8, 2007

The brief saga of Edie Sedgwick, a society girl who became the darling of the Andy Warhol scene in the ’60s, has somehow caught the popular imagination and held it for a few years – longer, in fact, than Sedgwick herself was in the public eye. And here comes a movie, “Factory Girl,” that recaps her sad life.

The movie focuses on the mid-1960s, when Edie Sedgwick turned her back on her Mayflower-descended roots and dropped into Warhol’s Factory, a borderless place of art, drugs and parties. She kept taking money from her wealthy family, of course, so it wasn’t entirely the bohemian life.

She’s played by Sienna Miller, the English actress from “Layer Cake” and “Casanova.” Miller gives the role more delicacy and thoughtfulness than the rest of the movie deserves, but it’s difficult to lend weight to a superficial character. Why we should take Sedgwick as more than the Paris Hilton of her day is never established.

Warhol is played by Guy Pearce, who does nicely at suggesting the artist’s ability to vanish even when he was standing right there. The relationship between muse Sedgwick and puppetmaster Warhol is the draw here, as Warhol decides that Sedgwick is a “Superstar” without her having to do anything in particular except be herself.

“Factory Girl” gets into the movies Warhol made in the 1960s, where the personalities of his “actors” became the point of his near-plotless films. It also implies that he could use the camera to exploit his people.

You can forgive the clumsy dialogue and biopic conventions for a while, just because the world of Warhol was a singular place. But when the movie introduces a famous folk singer (Hayden Christensen) as Edie’s true love, it steps into silliness and doesn’t recover.

It’s hard to tell whether this character is meant to be a real-deal alternative to Warhol’s airy artiness, or a self-righteous buzzkill. What isn’t mysterious is that he’s supposed to be Bob Dylan, even though the movie takes pain not to identify him. The real Bob Dylan has complained about the portrayal, and if the filmmakers didn’t want to draw an exact connection, they shouldn’t have allowed “Star Wars” guy Hayden Christensen to ape Dylan in his performance. And a bad performance it is, too.

Director George Hickenlooper previously did the documentary “Mayor of the Sunset Strip,” which was a much more entertaining look at the 1960s. This movie just presents the surface. That’s what Warhol did, too, but he meant to present the surface. The film can’t go deeper.

Sienna Miller stars in “Factory Girl.”