The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

What is so compelling about this story is Jessica Lange's performance and the vulnerability she displays. It is the story of a strong rebellious woman way ahead of the socially acceptable parameters of her generation. For that she suffers innumerable injustices. This film will emotionally drained you. Lange's performance is gut wrenching. It is a love story at it's core. "Harry" truly loved her and when he sees the altered Frances post lobotomy and realizes that the woman he loves is a mere shell of her former self his pain is palatable. This movie left me emotionally drained and it was truly worth it. Simply wonderful.

Despite a lot of errors including one apparently fictional lover for Frances Farmer, the film Frances is a look at on oddball type movie star for her time.Today Frances Farmer's activities for various causes wouldn't raise a sleepy eyebrow in Hollywood. Never mind being committed to an insane asylum. She'd more at home now in the film industry than in the studio system of the day. The system is personified here by Paramount Pictures executive Allan Rich who is a cross between studio presidents Barney Balaban and Emmanuel Cohen in the day.But Jessica Lange truly becomes Frances Farmer the girl with a social conscience, truly who did not like the cheesecake image that Paramount wanted her to fill. She also learned from her experience in the Group Theater that even liberal activists could be snakes. Clifford Odets with whom she had one torrid affair with and Harold Clurman manager of the Group Theater let her down. Odets's wife never seen emerges as a villain of sorts who gets her man back. Not is she mentioned by name, but it was Luise Rainer who was still very much alive and lived to the ripe old age of 104.So in fact is Farmer's first husband Leif Ericksen never mentioned by name. He's given the fictional name of Dick Steele and he's a minor character and played by Christopher Pennock.Sam Shepard is not real, he's an amalgam of several left wing activists from the Seattle area where Frances Farmer was from. But he functions as sort of an emotional balance, someone who Farmer could turn to when she was unable to cope with all the lies and promises of show business.If there is an award for bit parts ever developed for the year 1982 it would go to Darrell Larson. He's a real bottom feeder stringer for gossip columnist Louella Parsons. He has two scenes with Lange and in the second she puts him down severely.Lange and Kim Stanley got Oscar nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. Stanley who could have done Frances back in her salad days plays her mother, a rather straitlaced woman who thinks her daughter must be crazy after all she and dad Bart Burns are the Ward and June Cleaver of the 30s, how could they raise a left wing radical. Ergo, she must be crazy. And Frances was going to stay in those asylums until she learned the error of her ways.Jessica Lange fits Frances Farmer so well you forget this is a film biography and think you are peaking in on the life of Frances Farmer. As good as the film is I can't recommend too strongly that you read her autobiography Will There Ever Be A Morning? One of the most honest Hollywood stories ever written.

This does tell a lot about Frances Farmer. She is a woman who has been thorough hell from being a Hollywood star to being a patient in a mental institution. I have no doubt that Hollywood triggered her anxiety, including her mother Lillian who pushed her to go back to Paramount when Frances didn't want to. Seriously, she is a grown adult, she shouldn't have treated her like that. I swear to you, Frances was a really intelligent person and she was way better then the doctors,lawyers and so on who were involved in putting her into an asylum. Of course there you go with ignorance, shutting people with all kinds of problems and not trying to find solutions or goals to make that happen for the individual. Thankfully that ignorance is history even this world is still crazy today with wars!Anyways, Jessica Lange was absolutely amazing and brilliant to play Frances Farmer. It was funny to think herself and her co-star Sam Shepard who played Frances lover Harry York were an actual couple in real life. I guess it was love at first sight on set eh? I have to say, this is a great film to watch even though there is one rape scene that can be extremely uncomfortable to look at and of course, the angry outbursts were upsetting. Two hours is really worth your time and you get interested in the life of Frances Farmer regardless if you know her or not!

This film is a stand out performance by Jessica Lange, who at this point in time appears in some films as the neurotic mother(as in "Prozac nation"), which covers the issue of clinical depression in a rather convoluted manner.This film details actress Frances Farmer's life, early success, stage and screen, her contempt for Hollywood superficiality and the eventual downward spiral f her career, as well as her sanity.The scenes with esteemed NY playwright Clifford Odets are interesting, well portrayed by Jeffrey DeMunn. Lange looks lovely, fragile yet tough, a defiant and independent spirit, especially considering this was the era of 1930's and 1940's.Her mother is well-portrayed by the rather schizoid Kim Stanley ("Séance for Wet Afternoon'). Ms. Stanley portrays a narcissistic, controlling and even malevolent force in Frances' life.When Frances tires of Hollywood facade and "glamour", she states to her mother she just wants to live her own life, quietly, and rejects Hollywood. This seemed to be the mechanism which enraged her mother, and eventually causes her to have Frances committed to the Western Asylum in Washington State.Many books have been written (although the supposed lobotomy issue has been debunked), but clearly Frances underwent insulin and other barbaric treatments while committed to the barbaric asylum. Lange is very believable here, disheveled, angry, but also edgy and raw. And not necessarily "in the wrong" despite American society and it treatment of emotionally disturbed inmates at the time.In a disturbing scene with psychiatrist, "Dr. Symington" it is evident at the time that railroading patients into involuntary commitment was all too commonplace. Frances may have been a common bipolar patient who would have responded to talk therapy, but this was never given a chance. Indeed, she was never given a chance.The book "Will There Really be a Morning?" is also a good reference for those interested in delving into Frances Farmer's biography. While some have mentioned this film doesn't accurately portray the story, I think overall the audience gets a clear sense of the despair, longing and passion which were interwoven in Miss Farmer's life, and Jessica Lange does an excellent portrayal here. Highly recommended. 9/10.