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Answering this question is the key, as it would allow us to determine if this is a work of mise-en-abime, where the form — the picture — is a reflection of the content i.e. the world it portrays — thus being conceived as a superficial work, or if it's just a failure from the director who brought us the highly enjoyable Mayor of the Sunset Strip. Creating a film where both the message and its vehicle mirror each other is probably one of the most perilous exercises in current cinema, as Paul Verhoeven can attest with Starship Troopers and Showgirls — how many blindfolded mainstream critics missed the point, accusing these pictures of being what they were actually denouncing — namely fascism and the vulgarity of Las Vegas, and by extension, American culture. After watching Factory Girl & The Mayor of the Sunset Strip, I realized that director George Hickenlooper works better when he evolves in superficial environments, the New York art scene here and the Hollywood music scene in the latter. Hickenlooper has a true fascination for these worlds. Each time he approaches them with an objective and sometime hard look, denouncing the posers from the Big Apple to the City of Angels, and sometimes even questioning the notion of art, as he does here through the Bob Dylan character. Whether it's Rodney Bingenheimer or Edie Sedgwick, he portraits the victims of a cutthroat world made of frauds and hidden agendas. While there is no doubt as to the validity of his points, the issue is that Hickenlooper needs to be taken by a strong hand to tell a story, as was the case with Bingenheimer who led him through Hollywood's glamorous ups and downs. To be frank, with such a real-live subject it would have been hard to not succeed, but when it's time to "recreate", it becomes obvious that the filmmaker lacks the narrative mastery to smoothly go from documentary to fiction. Despite the support of brave and twisted performances — Sienna Miller as Edie and Guy Pearce as Warhol — the director fails to capture the aura of the characters and the essence of the factory. Beside her beauty and candor, why was Edie so fascinating? Why was Warhol so attractive? The film doesn't answer these questions, and they are the basis with which this film works. Nor does it dare to depict the depravity of the protagonists, preferring to cut quickly from one sequence to the other to offer a soft biopic that aims at being adult in its themes but flirts onscreen with teenage-friendly ratings. Since I'm far from being a Bob Dylan fan, I certainly can't attest about the veracity of Hayden Christensen's performance — even though my intuition goes into a certain direction — but I certainly regret that some emblematic figures were almost absent here — Paul Morrissey and the Velvet Underground to name a few. Where Factory Girl succeeds the most is at portraying a love story between two people of different sexual orientations, but it's certainly not enough to save this unintentionally superficial work from being a failure.
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