Blonde is a Netflix movie based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates that tells a fictionalized story of the life of Marilyn Monroe. In the movie, Monroe is played by Ana De Armas, of Knives Out and No Time to Die fame. She does a great job in the role, and the faults of the movie are really not on her, it was on the source material and the screenplay by writer/director Andrew Dominik.
The movie starts out with Norma Jeane (the book and the movie adds an e to her middle name) as a child, living with her mentally unstable mother and pining for a secretive father (whom her mother hints is a big-time star), which is a theme throughout the movie. It mostly skips her time in an orphanage and in foster care, which covers the first third of the book, and jumps to her first audition in which she is raped by a studio executive. Then it basically spans her adult life as she becomes more famous and more mentally ill as she bounces from one relationship to another trying to make up for the love of her missing father (who writes her letters throughout the movie hinting that he will see her in person soon).
Like the book, the movie really focuses on the darkest aspects of Marilyn Monroe's life. Certainly, given the fact that she died at the age of 36, most likely due to a drug overdose (the movie does hint at the possibility that she may have been murdered, which has been mostly debunked, but really films it both ways) her life was not all sunshine and roses. But, it also totally ignored things like her fighting for better roles and starting her own production company, helping Ella Fitzgerald's career, and the like. The movie is really about her going crazy and almost becoming a split personality, Norma Jeane and the fake entity, Marilyn, whom she hated. In real life it is known that she made comments about "giving" people Marilyn, suggesting that Marilyn was a performance she put on, but the movie makes Marilyn something that she has to summon.
There is a lot of sex and nudity in the movie, mostly topless shots by De Armas, but a couple of butt shots and a blink and you'll miss it frontal shot that is pretty obscured. It does show her in a "throuple" relationship with Charlie Chaplin Junior and Eddie Robinson and shows her marriages to Joe Dimaggio (just called The Ex-Athlete) and Arthur Miller (called The Playwright). At the end of the movie, it gets into her fling with JFK, and has the scene that very likely earned the NC-17 rating, a simulated blowjob that basically just has her head bobbing up and down over her hand.
Overall, De Armas does a great job channeling the look and the sound of Monroe. Given that she has a thick Cuban accent, the fact that she successfully pulled off Monroe's pretty distinctive voice was impressive. I did see a review where someone complained that De Armas' real accent came through a couple of times, but I honestly never noticed that. I think you basically have to take the movie with a grain of salt. While some of the things portrayed in the movie did happen, a lot did not or were at least partially made up to fill in details and sensationalize things. I think the movie overstates her level of mental illness and made her out to be as mentally ill as her mother was, which by all accounts she was not. It is worth watching as long as you understand that it is not a historically accurate docu-drama.
