Edie American Girl Sedgwick

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Edie is the story of Edie Sedgwick, a poor little rich girl who stumbled, half-crocked, into the heady world of Andy Warhol's hippy-era Factory. An arguably talented but certainly engaging collection of degenerate dilettantes narrates this oral biography: Ondine, Gerard Malanga, Brigid Berlin, Viva, Ultra Violet, Billy Name, to name a few. But the splendid cast of characters doesn't end there. People like Bob Dylan and Diana Vreeland and even, oddly, Lance Loud (of the PBS documentary "An American Family") also make appearances. As they share their remembrances of Edie, they each manage to share, intentionally or unintentionally, something of themselves and of the extraordinary times in which they all found themselves. The skeleton of this story is assembled from the fragile bones of Edie's life, collected by the people who witnessed her meteoric rise from New York socialite to model to Warholian Superstar and who were there to gasp in awe as her star plummeted to the earth, ending in her death from a barbiturate overdose in 1971. But as each narrator adds a memory to the memorial body, the flesh and feelings of an entire person emerges, along with the extraordinary times that they shared. In the story of Edie, we see the youthful radiance of the 60's counterculture degenerate into a toxic and bewildered soup by decade's end. Like the cynical, drug-addled world that produced movies like "Factory Diaries," "Vinyl" and "Poor Little Rich Girl," "Edie" is often grotesque, assaultive, overcompensating. But it is also fascinating, a tapestry whose individual pieces are as interesting as the whole. So, too, is this a wonderful example of what an oral biography does best: it brings us into a room and into conversation with people with whom we may never speak. If you're looking to have a chat with the counter-culture, "Edie" is here, inviting you to the party.