Now screening

‘CHRISTINE’

Starring: Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Timothy Simons, J. Smith-Cameron, 2:03, (R)

In July, 1974, Christine Chubbuck, a 29-year-old news reporter in Sarasota, Florida, drew a revolver and fatally shot herself during a live broadcast. It was a dubious first in the history of television as well as a tragic, terrifying final gesture from a woman whose personal and professional misery ran agonizingly deep, as the director Antonio Campos has sought to unpack at length in his skillfully unnerving new drama.

By turns coolly observed and disquietingly compassionate — qualities that also describe Rebecca Hall’s brilliant central performance — the movie drifts alongside its subject through the hell of her last weeks, gathering observations about her life and work and turning them into signifiers of psychological dread, slowly building a persuasive case for why she did it.

A film of tough, roiling emotions and teasing insights into the gender dynamics and corporate media strategies of the ’70s, the movie shrewdly embodies the very tensions that Chubbuck finds herself wrestling with — caught between her desire to do respectable, socially relevant work and her newsroom’s “if it bleeds, it leads” philosophy.

In capturing the atmosphere of a studio in all its buzzing, whirling glory, Campos’ film earns and provides the sort of validation that the real Christine Chubbuck surely deserved more of: the satisfaction of a job well done.