The vibrant 1960s New York art scene has never seemed as boring and programmatic as in George Hickenlooper’s Factory Girl, a pointless excuse for the director to recreate hep locations (the Factory, the Hotel Chelsea) and counterculture icons (Andy Warhol, the Velvet Underground). As a biopic of Warhol’s favorite superstar, Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller), Factory Girl is shallow, devoting more time to her dull, scant romance with the faux-Dylan Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen) than the demons really plaguing her, the sexual abuse she suffered from her homophobic father. If it’s an incomplete portrait of Sedgwick, it’s an even more worthless one of Warhol, unconvincingly played by a ghostly-pale Guy Pearce — then again, it’s hard to fathom a better Warhol than Jared Harris in I Shot Andy Warhol. Hickenlooper employs grainy, faux-vintage footage to enhance the period authenticity and employs the kind of psychedelic camera trickery most film students outgrow before their thesis project, which helps exude the icky vibe of watching a Behind the Music under the influence of a mediocre bong hit. Even the sex scene lacks spark, its Red Shoe Diaries sultriness utterly out of place.
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