It stings the ego to say this, but I do not understand this film, at least not as a whole. The first half I understand as a quasi-satire of the monetizing and fetishizing of tragedies, with the survivor of a school shooting turning the nation's thoughts and prayers (and the multitude of media cameras) into a launchpad for a career in pop music. The second half I understand as an acting showcase for Natalie Portman as the aforementioned girl as an adult, now a self-destructive and acid-tongued diva in a nearly constant state of personal crisis amid the gilded cage of celebrity and wealth.

I am not sure, however, why writer and director Brady Corbet put these ideas together or what his overall point is. No notion—pop stars as products manufactured by their minders, the long-term impact of trauma on familial bonds—is lingered on long enough to blossom into a three-dimensional theme. The experience is entertaining, odd, unpersuasive.

Portman certainly does a great deal of capital-A, no-stone-unturned acting: screaming, snarling, weeping, and ultimately performing a mostly convincing simulation of a contemporary pop concert (with sinuous choreography and shiny-but-unmemorable original songs penned by Sia). She devours the film whole once she enters it, but there is an undeniably electrifying quality to her TMZ sturm und drang. And Corbet has a stylishly austere directorial eye and a welcome tendency toward extended, winding shots following his characters through rooms and crowds.

There are irritants, too: the loquacious voice-over, heavy on biographical minutiae and tangential asides and recorded by Willem Dafoe, is too cute by half. And the age of certain cast members can be disorienting: for an hour, we follow 16-year-old Raffey Cassidy as the main character, Celeste, and 27-year-old Stacy Martin as her protective sister. Then the rest of the film focuses on 37-year-old Portman as Celeste, with Cassidy now playing the role of Celeste's daughter while Martin, who appears no older, remains as Celeste's "elder" sister, but now registering as younger. The transition from the then to the now is more convoluted than it needs to be (and therefore less convincing and more jarring than it should be).