Kristen Stewart gives a heartfelt performance as actor Jean Seberg, harassed by the
FBI for supporting the Black Panthers

Probably no movie actress suffered more from a combination of misogynist
Hollywood politics and reactionary
Washington politics than Jean Seberg. The star of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless suffered years of harassment and surveillance from the FBI for supporting the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, all of which contributed to her depression and was a factor in Seberg taking her own life in 1979.
The tragic drama of Seberg’s life should make her a great biopic subject, particularly its amazingly symbolic early episode in which, playing Joan of Arc for Otto Preminger in 1957, she underwent a terrifying near martyrdom tied to the stake when the arrogant and reckless director allowed real flames to get too close to her. And yet the disparate episodes of her life are tricky to encompass dramatically, and a 1983 stage musical, Jean Seberg, for London’s National Theatre with
music by Marvin Hamlisch was a notorious flop.