A brilliant and devastating portrait of Marilyn Monroe

Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Blonde’ translates as a grim, depressing and tragic anti-fairytale

If you want to know about the biographical facts of the life of Marilyn Monroe you can read one of the dozens of biographies written about the actress since her death in 1962 or watch one of the many lurid, conspiracy theory-tinged documentaries about her life and death and how the “Kennedys did it”, on the Discovery Channel and elsewhere. You can also enjoy the very good fictionalised biographical film My Week With Marilyn starring the excellent Michelle Williams.

If you want to see how Marilyn Monroe, the star into whom Norma Jean Baker was transformed by Hollywood, became a mythic and symbolic canvas for the projection of mostly male American desire you can read Norman Mailer’s maddeningly egocentric, sometimes uncomfortably misogynist but often brilliant 1973 pictorial essay Marilyn: A Biography. If you want a more sensitive take in the battle of the sexes there is feminist icon Gloria Steinem’s angry 1986 rebuttal to Mailer, Marilyn: Norma Jean.

But if you really wish to grasp the turbulent inner life and complexities of the tragic figure, the young, traumatised Norma Jean Baker and her not always willing, sometimes violently abusive transformation into the sex bomb and screen siren with the baby voice, the book to read is novelist Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 magnum opus Blonde.

The novel is, as its author cautions in her introduction, not a biographical work but rather, “A radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction”. The response to it was divisive. The book was nominated for prestigious prizes and hailed as Oates’s masterwork — a Moby Dick for the 20th century — which got closer to the dark underbelly of the US celebrity machine than anything before.

It was also criticised in some circles for its luridness and angry accusatory takedown of the misogyny of Hollywood power structures, more than a decade before #MeToo and the fall of Harvey Weinstein.

Blonde took all the strands of writing and thinking about the icon that Monroe was and reorganised and reimagined them into a brilliant, sprawling, emotionally devastating examination of one young, poor, abused and neglected American girl’s transformation into a piece of meat ogled over by millions and always divided between the two selves she carried within her — Norma Jean and the character she performed on-screen.

It is necessary to understand Oates’s book and her broader project of trying to interrogate a particularly American golden age Hollywood phenomenon, of which Monroe was perhaps the most famous example, to truly appreciate Australian director Andrew Dominik’s near three-hour adaptation. Arriving on Netflix this week to a viscerally divisive critical response it is daring, innovative, often brilliant, sometimes frustrating but never boring and gutsily provocative.

Like the novel, Dominik’s film should not be seen as a biographical portrait of Monroe, even if some of the characters and incidents in its narrative are inspired by real life. Rather it is a unique cinematic achievement that comes closer to evoking something of the feeling and inner world of its subject than any straight biopic could ever hope to. If you have read Oates’s novel you will certainly have an advantage in terms of having an idea of what to expect but if you are looking for some sort of life story, a recreation of iconic moments from history, you need to look elsewhere.

Dominik’s main interest is not the true story but rather the grim, depressing and oppressively tragic anti-fairytale of an emotionally bruised, sexually abused young woman — and how her innocence, dreams and hopes were chewed up and spat out by a violently misogynist system when she killed herself at the age of 36, 60 years ago.

The film is technically bold and omnivorous in its reference material: from iconic photographs to scenes from films and promotional materials. It’s also frenetic in style and aesthetic choices — mixing colour, black and white, square and wide frames, absurd and often nasty visual jokes, bizarre interludes involving talking foetuses and vaginal point-of-view abortions. If, as some critics have decried, the film is exploitative, an argument could well be made that it exploits not so much its subject but rather the pop culture iconography and mythology that enveloped her for most of her life and in the decades since her death.

It wouldn’t be able to get away with all of this heavy aesthetic experimentation and surreal play if it didn’t have something constantly strong, intriguing and emotionally compelling at its centre. That something isn’t Chayse Irvin’s dazzlingly innovative cinematography or the enigmatically eerie score provided by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis but rather the complex, emotionally compelling and inspirationally dedicated performance of Ana de Armas. In striving to capture Monroe as the troubled fictionalised protagonist of Oates’s novel, De Armas ends up creating the most layered, empathetic and ghoulishly pitch-perfect on-screen portrait of Marilyn yet realised.

Dominik’s adaptation is not without flaws or beyond criticism and is never easy to watch, even for Oates, who said in a recent interview with The New Yorker that she had to “stop watching about midway through. The film is emotionally exhausting.” She was ultimately pleased with how it turned out, though, describing it as, “A work of art. Andrew Dominik is a very idiosyncratic director, so he appropriated the subject and made it into his own vision.”

• “Blonde” is streaming on Netflix