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Two out of Five stars
Running time: 90 mins

Sienna Miller is perfectly cast but the script barely scratches the surface and you never really get inside any of the characters.

What's it all about?
Directed by documentary-maker George Hickenlooper, Factory Girl stars Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, an artistic girl from a prominent New England family, who falls in with Andy Warhol's Factory crowd in the 1960s. Edie's distinctive style inspires Warhol (Guy Pearce) and he uses her in several of his projects, making her famous in the process.

However, Edie's own artistic projects come to nothing and instead she finds herself heavily caught up in the drugs scene which plays havoc with her already fragile mental state, thanks to her troubled family background. Hope seems to arrive in the form of a relationship with a famous musician (Hayden Christensen) but the romance ignites Warhol's jealousy.

The Good
Miller is perfectly cast and it's easy to see why she was attracted to the project, given that Miller and Sedgwick are both more famous for being famous than for their own artistic talents. However, the lacklustre script doesn't give her much to work with, refusing to add any depth to her character and painting her as a passive and increasingly unsympathetic victim instead.

The Bad
Hickenlooper's preference for impersonation rather than character means that Pearce is effectively wasted as Warhol, his performance reduced to a blonde wig and a neat line in catty comments. The same is equally true of the other characters although Mary Elizabeth Winstead has a superb cameo as an Edie clone in the film's best scene.

Similarly, whilst the period detail is often impressive, the film frequently falls down thanks to laughably bad scenes such as the decidedly over-hyped sex scene between Miller and Christensen.

Worth seeing?
Miller does her best but the script never really brings Edie to life and the intriguing real-life clips over the end credits will make you wish that this had been a documentary instead.