• Netflix

You don't need to have read Joyce Carol Oates' novel Blonde to understand that the Marilyn Monroe portrayed in it is not really Marilyn Monroe, but "Marilyn Monroe." She's a fiction, and a fiction twice-removed at that: both the fictionalized version of Norma Jeane Baker created by the author, and the blonde sex goddess manufactured by studio publicity and Norma Jeane's own ability to disassociate. Writer/director Andrew Dominik's adaptation was no more meant to be a biopic than Oates' book was meant to be a biography; however much their events strayed from what "really happened," both are attempts to wrestle a human character out of an icon.

There is, however, a fundamental challenge in taking Oates' densely literary prose and attempting to capture the same ideas cinematically. While the novel winds its way through the point of view of other characters, its fundamental goal is taking someone who was almost always first and foremost an image, and bringing us inside her head. Dominik's Blonde, on that level, is almost built to fail. The internal must become external, and the spectacle of Norma Jeane's life of tragedies overwhelms the possibility of knowing how she actually felt about them.

For the most part, Dominik keeps things chronological, starting with the young Norma Jeane's life with her mentally unstable mother (Julianne Nicholson) in 1930s Los Angeles, followed by years in an orphanage when her mother is institutionalized. But soon we pick up the aspiring actress Norma Jeane (Ana de Armas) getting her shot at a studio contract, becoming the beloved, lusted-after movie star who ends up in highly-publicized marriages to The Ex-Athlete (Bobby Cannavale) and The Playwright (Adrien Brody).

Refusing to use the names "Joe DiMaggio" and "Arthur Miller" feels as artificial here as it did in Oates' novel, while weirdly Dominik does eventually name the studio executive who rapes Norma Jeane in his office. That's perhaps the least of the challenges the filmmaker faces in his adaptation, however, as he pares down more than 700 pages of text in ways that lose crucial components like Norma Jeane's first, teenage marriage, and its connection to the way her voluptuous body shaped her doomed destiny.

What he loses in narrative detail, Dominik works overtime to make up for with eye-catching visuals. Some of them work magnificently, like a scene of "Marilyn" arriving at a movie premiere with crowds of men yelling after her, their mouths digitally distorted into gaping maws, or a shot of Norma Jeane and her "throuple" Hollywood-scion lovers Charlie Chaplin Jr. (Xavier Samuel) and Edward G. Robinson Jr. (Evan Williams) with their bodies stretched and twisted into funhouse-mirror taffy. And others just feel frustratingly ill-conceived, like shifting from color to black-and-white seemingly at random throughout the 176-minute running time.

It's hard to argue that Dominik isn't doing his damnedest to make Blonde something that's not purely literary—which is why I'm not sure it ever could have worked fully. De Armas delivers a terrific performance, evoking the way Norma Jeane had to find "Marilyn" within herself before being able to play that role, let alone any other role "Marilyn" was being asked to play. But the film short-changes the notion of Norma Jeane as an intuitive, brilliant actor, and the passion she brought to her work, in order to focus on the awful events in her personal life: sexual assault; an abortion that may or not have been her choice; domestic violence; a miscarriage of a later pregnancy. It becomes awfully hard to focus on Norma Jeane's feelings about these events when the images on screen are presenting a uterus-cam, or John F. Kennedy forcing her to give him a blow job.

There are moments when Dominik's version of Blonde feels inspired by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, with the score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis providing the unsettling Angelo Badalamenti undertones to the tale of a beauty whose backstory hid horrors and particularly damaging daddy issues. This narrative, however, has to keep pushing through the "Marilyn Monroe" timeline, losing that thread of trying to survive a haunted existence. Whatever cocktail of fact and fiction Oates' Blonde served up, it was driven by a desire to portray its heroine as more than a victim. For too much of this film, she remains the icon—"Marilyn," rather than Norma Jeane, defined by what killed her rather than who she was when she was still alive.