February 10, 2023, 10:34am
Today, in casting news that just feels right: Kristen Stewart will be starring as Susan Sontag in a biopic based on Benjamin Moser’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 biography Sontag: Her Life and Work.
Kristen Stewart is no stranger to biopics, having starred, most recently, as Princess Diana in 2021’s Spencer as well as 2009’s The Runaways (as Joan Jett), 2018’s JT LeRoy (as Savannah Knoop) and Seberg (as Jean Seberg). And while I’m generally skeptical of biopics (because lives have no narrative arc and I find that attempts to force them into a shape that movie-going audiences find interesting are usually unsuccessful), both the casting and the source material of this one have piqued my interest.
The film—working title: Sontag—will be directed by Kirsten Johnson, whose most recent previous film, Dick Johnson Is Dead, is a speculative documentary in which Johnson’s father, who suffers from dementia, enacts various versions of his death.
Okay, fine, I’ll watch a biopic. Just this once.
[via ScreenDaily]