Un peu de sexe, beaucoup de drogue et pas mal de rock'n'roll... Le portrait de star façonné par George Hickenlooper (...) mise sur les couleurs primaires attendues - auxquelles s'est ajoutée une touche freudienne. Scénario convenable mais convenu de l'ascension d'une star, suivie de son inévitable descente. Ainsi va l'étoile filante... On déplorera dans la foulée la superficialité du commentaire portant sur le star-system - et sur l'univers immensément fascinant de la Factory d'Andy Warhol. Le film soigne surtout ses apparences (épatants, les costumes et les décors) et s'efforce de recréer visuellement le tourbillon des sixties sans prendre le temps de mesurer ses racines et ses retombées.

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The story of New York it girl, fashion icon and Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick (1943-71) has taken on the proportions of a cult myth, as do most true tales of brief, intense lives. Focusing on the year or so in the mid-1960s when she burned brightest and crashed most dramatically, FACTORY GIRL boasts its own bright intensity, fueled in large part by leads Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce. Director George Hickenlooper captures the energy and ultra-irony of Warhol's scene, but his attempts to give the film a conventional biopic arc end up wallowing in dime-store psychology. The central performances will generate strong word-of-mouth for the picture (...). Pearce (...) is compelling and witty as the pallid Svengali (...). As the beauty who for a while captivated him beyond all others, Miller delivers a powerful performance.

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A brisk, superficial treatment of the tragic supernova life of Edie Sedgwick, FACTORY GIRL disappoints as both biography and drama. The film charts the "poor little rich girl's" trajectory as decidedly downward from Cambridge art student to Andy Warhol's disposable model/actress/muse and finally to institutionalized drug addict. As a hopped-up ramble through the Pop Art '60s, it's more like THAT GIRL on speed than anything else. Directed by George Hickenlooper from a screenplay by the improbably named Captain Mauzner (...), the movie never gets beyond a psychosexual portrayal of Sedgwick as victim. Fans well-schooled in the lore of Warhol in general and all things Edie in particular will come away with no deeper understanding of the principals while newcomers will wonder what the fuss was all about in the first place.

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When making a movie set in the recent past, you’re dead if it doesn’t look authentic. And the kindest thing to be said about this deluxe photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller’s Edie and Guy Pearce’s Andy capture their characters’ images and body language with relative precision. (Mr. Pearce is much prettier than the real Warhol; if Ms. Miller doesn’t have Sedgwick’s throaty smoker’s voice and aristocratic air, she gives a furious, thrashing performance as a lost little rich girl.) The crinkled tinfoil glitter of Warhol’s East 47th Street “Silver Factory” is accurately rendered, and the actors cast as members of the Warhol entourage are reasonable physical approximations.

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The wild, unhinged life of Andy Warhol's favorite "superstar," Edie Sedgwick, is refashioned in FACTORY GIRL as a tame biopic with little feel for the 1960s New York Underground. Though Sedgwick embodied everything that glittered and grated about the era's counterculture, director George Hickenlooper evinces no deep interest in the time and place, resulting in a film that feels removed from its source. (...) Filmic use of color and black-and-white, plus pallid re-creations of certain Warhol pics (including several of his "Screen Tests"), has fewer ties to Warhol cinema than to the multiformat work of cinematographer Robert Richardson. Absence of any reference to Sedgwick's only commercial starring film, CIAO! MANHATTAN, is strange.

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