In its March 7, 1955 issue, Life magazine ran a photo spread of James Dean, a largely unknown young actor whose first major role was about to have its premiere. Branding the East of Eden heartthrob with the headline “Moody Young Star,” Dennis Stock’s atmospheric black-and-white essay placed Dean against a variety of equivalently morose backdrops, from a cold, rainy Times Square to the rustic shabbiness of the Indiana farm where he was raised. A bit too enamored of the textural and dramatic potential of restaging these moments, Anton Corbijn’s Life recreates the real-life story behind these photos through the lens of a character-focused two-hander, with the older, not much wiser Stock Robert Pattinson drawn further into the orbit of the mumbly, monomaniacally assured Dean Dane DeHaan as the soon-to-be legend struggles against the stifling constraints of his incipient fame.
Life digs into this struggle in the increasingly familiar form of the micro biopic, the en vogue alternative to the sweeping lifelong chronicle, which forsakes comprehensiveness in order to settle in on one representative event. Considering the flashbulb burst of Dean’s career, which peaked and then came to a tragic close in the span of less than one year, this seems like the natural choice. It also jives with the film’s other recognizable narrative mode, the story of the artist both obsessed and repelled by the magnetism of his subject, whose power is so great that it will forever transform his outlook on life. In some sense this parallels the public fascination with Dean, who burned with such weird, jittery energy and then flamed out almost instantly, altering the template for male stardom and enshrining himself in the pop culture pantheon. In depicting the lead-up to this sanctification, the film does a nice job of sketching out the love/hate relationship between its principal male characters, although it ultimately fails to express much beyond the dull outlines of this blockily structured story.
A renowned photographer himself, Corbijn seems interested in revealing the behind-the-scenes details that led to the Life spread, using the individual images as familiar signposts around which the story is structured. Yet Life doesn’t really work as a brass tacks examination of professional celebrity photography, since its subject is already so mythologized and the process behind these pictures seems to have been so patently unusual. Stock first runs into Dean at a party at Nicholas Ray’s house, where the peculiar actor is lurking out by the fringes of the pool, his face turned ghostly by its pale, shimmering light. He’s being considered for the lead in Rebel Without a Cause, and Stock is instantly drawn to his unorthodox mixture of camera-shy defiance and pouty, needful narcissism. Striking up mutually beneficial business arrangement, the two end up locked into a sort of symbiotic battle of wills, each pursuing and then avoiding the other, as Stock tries to wrestle some magic out of the recklessly unstable actor.
What is interesting is the portrayal of how fame itself is constructed. Dean views himself as an artist, but his egotistical devotion to crafting his own doe-eyed poetic persona also seems threatened by a certain measure of self-loathing. He’s even more spiteful toward the slippery machinations of studio boss Jack Warner (played with villainous smarm by Ben Kingsley), who’s as passive-aggressively manipulative and conniving as Dean is faux-sensitive. After his young star cackles at the poor quality of a Western during an interview with reporters, Warner calls a meeting in his office where he’s just put up a huge poster of the film in question. This is the soft reminder of who is the puppeteer and who is the puppet; the hard one comes soon after, as Warner hectors Dean, producing the recovered interview tape and declaring how much the actor now owes him for his efforts.
These methods establish the film as less interested in the dark side of Hollywood than its balance sheet equilibrium, the inevitable tradeoff between commerce and art. This tension is matched on Stock’s side of the equation by a similar clash between rival duties, to the bosses he serves and the family he should be caring for. Spending most of his time in Los Angeles, chasing stars and doing unfulfilling red carpet work to pay the bills, the photographer continues to neglect his family back in New York. Dean’s family in Indiana, on the other hand, seems awed by his fame, while also proudly aware that he can only really be himself—not the feckless, fretful neurasthenic of his star persona—amid the humble environs of their small town. Both men are pulled toward their worst selves by the jobs they have to perform, and their passions which don’t play out as smoothly as their former dreams might have suggested. This acute focus means that, while Life fails to engage much in a dramatic sense, it does succeed in transcending its biopic limitations, formulating a reasonably strong analysis of the politics of fame and success.