Greetings again from the darkness. Andy Warhol and The Factory poses quite the challenge to any filmmaker attempting to capture the look, feel and pain of that world unto itself. Director George Hickenlooper's best work has been "Mayor of Sunset Strip" and "Dogtown", neither of which drew much of an audience. "Factory Girl" probably has little hope of attracting much attention from movie-goers as well.

While we do spend a good portion of the film in The Factory, this is more the tragic story of Edie, rather than an insightful look at Warhol's art. Edie was really the first to make being famous a job ... think Paris Hilton today. No real talent herself, her name, family money and looks got her inside the art world and exceptionally close to Warhol. Of course, those things were not enough to carve out any real territory and the ending, while tragic, is not at all surprising.

The film is overly choppy in attempting to find the right look and feel and yet with Jagger, Velvet Underground and the Dylanesque Hayden Christensen, the importance and power of music for this era is clearly established. Aussie Guy Pearce does a nice impersonation of Warhol and Jimmy Fallon has his first serious role. Other support comes from Mena Suvari as Edie's friend, Beth Grant as Warhol's mom, Don Novello (Father Guido from early SNL),and Illeana Douglas as Diana Vreeland.

By far the best part of this project is the performance of Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick. Even her vocal cadence is remarkable. The physical and emotional turmoil seems very real as Edie goes from top of world to desperation for life. Ms. Miller will at some point break out and become the film star she is destined to become. That role has just not quite happened yet. It could be later this year when she re-teams with her "Layer Cake" director. Let's hope so. Her talent is undeniable and although it is a pleasure to see her performance as Edie, she deserves a much wider audience.

The weakness of the film is best shown by the interviews over the closing credits. Attempting to explain what we had just watched is a pure indication that the job had not been done well.

It's not a documentary.

Just in case you read some of the rather hysterical comments and garner the impression that it's supposed to be about real people, it's not. Andy Warhol was never a real person, just a performance.

Guy Pearce presents Andy Warhol as the superficial creature he undoubtedly was. The original art-as-business creator, the very God at whose altar such modern day charlatans as Damien Hirst worship. Pearce's performance is riveting, his Andy Warhol is as empty as his crapulous art; just a two-dimensional diagram of someone who leaves no shadow. A cartoon.

Sienna Miller's performance as Edie Sedgewick is the best thing she's ever done. Caught in the strobe lights of Warhol's strangely sterile world of non-sexual sex and sofas still in their plastic wrappers, Edie becomes the focus of his short attention span for a while. She flashes across the screen like a speeded up Holly Golighty, while Warhol's voyeuristic viewfinder traps her in it's leering stare. The camera loves her and so does Warhol. But we know it's going to end in tears.

Nothing in the movie has much depth, none of the characters are developed beyond what we already know about them and the whole sixties New York scene is represented by a series of iconic "things". The Chelsea Hotel, the Velvet Underground, a soundtrack of songs that sound right but which actually don't fit at all. For instance, "Leavin' here" by The Birds, a British group in which Ronnie Wood was the guitarist, was recorded in 1966 but was never released in America. However, there it is on the soundtrack being played in the factory sometime in 1965.

But no matter.

The movie pretty much captures the shallow, transient and utterly facile world of Warhol in the sixties and in another way it sums up the emptiness and tragedy of the Hollywood dream machine too. But it doesn't ask any deep questions nor does it pretend to be something it's not. It's entertaining and worth watching for two very good performances by Guy Pearce and Sienna Miller.

It's not art, it's just a movie, albeit a superficial one.

For the concerted effort Sienna Miller puts into her searing portrayal of Warhol protégé and underground celebrity Edie Sedgwick, it would have been rewarding to experience a film that matches her unbridled dramatic impact. Unfortunately, director George Hickenlooper, primarily a documentary filmmaker, seems more focused on eye-catching cinematic techniques - a deliberately artsy mix of overtly dramatic images, grainy film stock and slow-motion photography - than honest character development in this highly fictionalized 2007 account of her brief life. The result feels energetic but ultimately rather cursory in the way he depicts the Manhattan party scene in the mid-1960's, in particular, the Factory, where Warhol let his coterie of drug-addicted fame-seekers gather to make virtually unwatchable films that reflect their constant state of ennui.

With her big raccoon eyes, pre-punk hairdo and flashing smile, Miller bears such a striking resemblance to the real-life Sedgwick that she carries much of the film by the sheer will of her character's Holly Golightly-like sense of exalted self-worth. But like Holly, Sedgwick lacked talent to sustain a film career, and the script leaves Miller to her own devices in connecting us with her character's tormented psyche amid her escalating drug use. On the upside, Guy Pearce accurately captures the discomfiting public image of Warhol down to the familiar narcissistic indifference and manipulative shyness, but his character gradually recedes into the background. At first, Hayden Christensen comes across as amateurish and unintentionally amusing as a Bob Dylan doppelganger, especially since he makes a feeble attempt at capturing the singer's recognizable speech cadences. Just as he manages to transcend the awkwardness of the character's intrusion into the story, he also disappears making his impact in Sedgwick's life feel rather fleeting.

Even though the cryptic screenplay by Captain Mauzner, Aaron Richard Golub and Simon Monjack conveniently paints Warhol and the faux-Dylan as polarizing figures pulling at Sedgwick's soul, the story really comes down to her own inner demons. The problem is that she remains oddly elliptical throughout, and Hickenlooper seems satisfied with leaving us with an impressionistic view of a person who barely warrants our attention forty years later. Among the supporting players, there are quite a familiar faces - Ileana Douglas as Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, Jimmy Fallon as Sedgwick's confidante Chuck Wein, Tara Summers as fellow Warhol protégé Brigid Berlin, Mena Suvari as Brigid's sister Richie, Edward Herrmann as the family attorney, Mary Kate Olsen as a partygoer. However, none of them are given any opportunity to shine.