"Factory Girl" is not, strictly speaking, a bad movie. It's something worse: an irredeemably banal drama about some of the most protean, contradictory creative forces of the 1960s. Director George Hickenlooper and his writing team take the story of Edie Sedgwick -- Warhol muse, Vogue's "youthquaker of 1965," speed freak, poor little rich girl, corpse -- and somehow manage to make it conventional. That's the first 45 minutes. Then the movie turns offensive.
You can't fault Sienna Miller, the British actress and minor gossip column fixture who plays Edie from her Cambridge art school days all the way to the final burn-out. Miller's pretty and quick, and so she gets some of the unearthly charisma you glimpse in old footage of Sedgwick. Guy Pearce makes an acceptable Andy Warhol, too, before the movie turns him into a vampire. A lost boy and a user under the white fright wig, he doesn't want to hang out with Edie so much as be her. Truman Capote had to invent his Holly Golightly; Andy has his presented to him like Venus on an ashtray.
