A shallow examination of racial issues in the 1960s 

Kristen Stewart finds a good vehicle in “Seberg,” in which she portrays the New Wave gamine Jean Seberg, but while Stewart musters an admirable intensity, the rest of the film remains fairly shallow. Seberg, who rose to fame in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 film “Breathless,” lived a short and painful life, and this film examines how she was the victim of surveillance and persecution by the FBI as a result of her support for the Black Panthers. 

Stewart’s “less is more” acting style works as she portrays a brooding young actress, dissatisfied with a career she sees as unimportant and looking for a way to do something meaningful to change the world for the better. Her agent and her husband, a French intellectual with whom she has a young son, discourage her activist urges. Meanwhile, the response from the community she wants to help is not always positive either.   

On a flight to L.A. from Paris, Seberg sees Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie) trying to purchase a seat in first class and being refused. She offers him her seat, and they begin to talk. The next thing we know, Seberg hops into a photo with Jamal and the Black Panthers, fist raised, and the FBI agents who were watching Jamal start watching her, too. The balance of her motives is murky; how much does her attraction to Jamal weigh into her decision to get involved with his cause?

One person who is not impressed by her is the smarmy FBI agent Carl Kowalski (Vince Vaughn), who, like everyone else around her, sees an opportunity to exploit her fame. Kowalski has a personal vendetta against progressive types and rails against his daughter’s Seberg-style pixie haircut. Paired with a new agent (Jack O’Connell), who has expertise in audio surveillance, Kowalski gleefully destroys Seberg’s reputation using the information he obtains about her affair with Jamal.  

Jamal’s wife, Dorothy (Zazie Beetz), is particularly suspect of the seemingly random generosity suddenly flowing from the gorgeous actress. This suspicion is, of course, totally justified since Seberg is also having an affair with her husband. She accuses Seberg of just being a “tourist” to their world. Once Dorothy receives an anonymous tip about Seberg’s level of involvement with Jamal, she calls her worse than that.

The film fails because the inciting feelings behind Seberg’s actions aren’t very well explained or expressed. Stewart does a good job of showing us how the paranoia and distress from the FBI’s actions make her fall apart. But the movie doesn’t do a good job of showing us why she is willing to risk her life for the cause she has taken up. The passionate desire to throw everything else in her life away in support of racial inequality seems arbitrary. Little is shown of the violence or problems going on in the world, and little is shown on the source of her personal convictions. A lot is shown of her topless, though. 

We learn more about the FBI agent’s marriage than we do about Seberg’s, and we don’t see Jamal and Dorothy discussing her, just Dorothy getting jealous of her. The balance of where the story spends its time is off. 

If one is looking for a film that illuminates the racial issues of the 1960s, this is not that film. It is called “Seberg” and it is about Jean Seberg, but it would have been a more compelling story if it had shown us more of why she behaved the way she did. Anthony Mackie is good but ultimately wasted as her charismatic love interest. He is little more than a plot point. But Kristen Stewart looks wonderful and plays a convincingly shattered woman. 

There are plenty of good scenes in “Seberg.” Overall, though, this film is little more than a vehicle for Stewart to look gorgeously distraught (which she does well) against an intriguing background story that leaves you wanting to know more. 

“Seberg” is currently available to stream on Amazon.