6/10
wrong protagonist
23 August 2019
It's 2001 San Francisco. Savannah Knoop (Kristen Stewart) visits her brother Geoffrey Knoop (Jim Sturgess) and his wife Laura (Laura Dern). Laura writes the novel Sarah under the pen name JT LeRoy with a picture from a thrift store. It's a fictional biography of a nameless abused boy whose mother Sarah is a prostitute in West Virginia. Laura has been giving a voice to JT on the phone and now she wants to use Savannah as the physical presentation of the boy. Laura pretends to be JT's British assistant who controls his every move. Eva (Diane Kruger) is a fan taken with the mysterious JT.

I'm getting a little tired of Kristen Stewart's intense reticent. She keeps doing the same moves. Savy is not the most compelling protagonist in this story anyways. This really has to be Laura's story. The only way to place her concluding speech in any context is to show her life. Savy doesn't seem to have agency at the beginning. It doesn't make her that compelling until she starts taking charge of herself. Whenever Eva comments on their phone calls, I keep thinking that the phone calls should be done on camera. Savy is the second or third most interesting character in her own story. It's an interesting story nevertheless.
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