Makeup and mimicry can take an actor only so far when playing one of the most enduring stars in the cinematic firmament: More crucial is that he have a certain intangible star quality of his own.
Such is the success of Dane DeHaan's magnetic take on James Dean in Life, Anton Corbijn's engaging, elegiac portrait of a legend in the making. More than a standard celebrity bio, however, this is a loving valentine from photographer-turned-director Corbijn to his name-making profession, with Robert Pattinson in a sly turn as Dennis Stock, the shutterbug who landed Dean a now- classic Life magazine spread.
It's the peculiarly moving friendship between the two men that distinguishes Life from standard inside- Hollywood fare.
In the mid-1950s, the high-haired, ill-fated Indiana native was arguably the first rock star of the American film industry, his brief screen career demonstrating the studio system's attempt to engage with the decade's reinvention of adolescence.
Via a brisk, literate script by Australian writer Luke Davies, Life identifies the key contradiction in Dean's star persona: A shy, genuinely gifted nonconformist, he was eventually (and posthumously) styled, marketed and managed to appear as untamed and undoctored an individual as possible.
The 26-year-old Stock is similarly at the outset of a promising (and, happily, longer-lived) career in his craft when he encounters Dean at a Nicholas Ray-hosted Chateau Marmont shindig. (Ray glides by with Natalie Wood; aficionados of the era will have a field day with the plethora of cannily cast cameos in this vein.) The two young men strike up a tentative rapport based, it appears, on a blend of mutual suspicion and attraction.
Stock professes to be intrigued by Dean's "awkwardness" and "purity." Dean, for his part, is fascinated by the cameraman's fascination -- as if he might catch a clue to his own identity reflected in the lens -- and agrees to be trailed for a photo essay.
DeHaan and Pattinson enact this anti-romance beautifully, each man quizzically eyeing the other for leads and clues, while coyly retreating from scrutiny. Pattinson, adding to his post-Twilight gallery of sharp-cut screw-ups, brings intriguing layers of childish dysfunction to a character who is only ostensibly the straight man in the partnership. DeHaan, meanwhile, plays Dean as the more openly flirtatious of the two, a flashier generational companion to his louchely inspired Lucien Carr in 2013's Kill Your Darlings.
Guy Lodge, Variety
Life (C+)
Directed by Anton Corbijn. R (some sexuality/nudity and language.) 111 mins. At the AMC Grapevine Mills.
