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The series does eventually try to weave in the story The Hollywood Reporter broke: how Angelyne was born to a Polish family of Holocaust survivors, and endured her volatile father by losing herself in dreams of embodying the high glamour of Marilyn Monroe. Where “Angelyne” most succeeds, however, is when it echoes the same carefully constructed campiness of its subject rather than try to create gravitas from the ground up.
In moments when Rossum embraces Angelyne’s baby-voiced coo, or Linklater adopts an impossibly affected drawl; when the cinematography echoes the flat, arid L.A. light sliding against the neon; when Angelyne’s daydreaming becomes a full-on alien abduction fantasy to lure us into the larger-than-life corners of her mind. When it’s not overly concerned with selling Angelyne as The Original #Influencer, the show is freer to simply show us what it’s like to be Angelyne, in all her perfectly tacky glory.
As people (mostly men) keep trying to dig up the truth of who Angelyne is, and Angelyne keeps refusing to let them, the show flips its own narrative inside-out to emphasize just how conflicted her story continues to be. Record scratches interrupt one person’s memory to let Angelyne’s version of events make their grand entrance; someone from her past implores her to face reality as she rolls her eyes in both flashback and the present; figures and objects disappear in the blink of an eye as she rewrites her own memory. It’s the kind of device that can backfire, and sometimes does here. More often, though, it’s a reminder of how this show knows something “Inventing Anna” never quite grasped: that conflicting versions of the same story can be even more interesting in their clashing than in their unraveling.
All five episodes of “Angelyne” premiere May 19 on Peacock. P-MRC is the joint venture established in October 2020 by Penske’s PMC and MRC that brought the Hollywood Reporter, Billboard and Vibe under the same roof as Variety, Rolling Stone and other entertainment and lifestyle media brands.
