Seberg

Seberg (2019) is a British-American thriller directed by Benedict Andrews — watch online on iFILM, with Kristen Stewart playing real-life actress Jean Seberg, supported by Jack O'Connell, Anthony Mackie, and Vince Vaughn.

Late 1960s Los Angeles. Jean Seberg is a French New Wave icon back in Hollywood, her career on the rise. Her relationship with Black Panther activist Hakim Jamal (Mackie) brings her to the attention of the FBI's COINTELPRO program. Agent Jack Solomon (O'Connell) is assigned to surveil her: wiretaps, round-the-clock tails, fabricated stories fed to gossip columns. Solomon gradually registers that the operation isn't intelligence work — it is a coordinated effort to break a person. Seberg, still half-believing the system wouldn't do this to her, breaks anyway.

The FBI's years-long surveillance of the real Jean Seberg is documented in declassified files; the film stays close to that record. Stewart plays the disbelief as much as the suffering — the gap between what Seberg thought her country was and what it actually did to her is where the film lives. Vaughn's stone-faced senior agent is a quietly unsettling piece of casting. Stream Seberg (2019) online on iFILM.