Review: Despite solid performances, historical drama 'Radium Girls' feels thin

It’s difficult to get a handle on what feels off about “Radium Girls,” a combination of sisterly melodrama, courtroom drama and historical tale that never comes together.

It’s 1925 in Orange, N.J., and the Cavallo sisters, Bessie (Joey King) and Josephine (Abby Quinn), earn what pennies they can to support themselves and their grandpa (Joe Grifasi) by working as “dial painters” at the local American Radium factory. They gets a penny a dial to paint the luminous dots on watch dials, which glow in the dark because of Marie Curie’s discovery, radium — which is also touted  by the boss, Mr. Roeder (John Bedford Lloyd), as “liquid sunshine,” a miracle substance that is sold as an over-the-counter medicine.

The girls at the factory are taking radium internally as part of their jobs. The technique for getting a fine point on their camel-hair paint brushes is to lick the brush between strokes — thus causing them to ingest bits of the radioactive substance. Some girls get sick and die, as Bessie and Jo’s sister Mary did three years earlier. Such deaths are diagnosed by the company doctor as syphilis, which is an effective lie because the girls who get sick don’t want to talk about it publicly.

When the company doctor (Neal Huff) examines Jo, who is feeling anemic and losing teeth, he makes the same diagnosis — which doesn’t fly, because Jo’s a virgin. Bessie, who would rather talk about Rudolph Valentino, meets a cute guy, Walt (Colin Kelly-Sordelet), who’s a Communist, and spurs Bessie toward activism. As Jo gets more ill, Bessie enlists a labor organizer, Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour), to find other girls and mount a lawsuit against American Radium.

Rookie screenwriters Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw present a highly fictionalized, and greatly simplified, version of the Radium Girls’ story — as they went from lowly factory workers to media darlings. The narrative is sanded smooth of any rough edges, and complex motivations are boiled down to justice vs. money.

Mohler shares directing credit with Lydia Dean Pilcher, one of the film’s producers, and the barebones production design makes one wonder if there were budgetary conflicts at work. (There’s a wealth of public-domain 1920s newsreel clips that take the place of establishing shots.) The production is so threadbare that it feels like the actors are playing actors and this is the movie-in-a-movie they’re making.

That said, there’s plenty of solid work in the lead performances by King (who’s grown up a lot from “Ramona and Beezus”) as Bessie, letting her inner Mother Jones blossom, and by Quinn (the milkshake girl in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”), who gives Jo a rebel spark even when saddled with having to portray someone with a terminal illness. They give “Radium Girls” a spirit and fire that outdoes the cast’s paltry surroundings. 

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‘Radium Girls’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 6, in Salt Lake Film Society’s virtual cinema, SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for bloody images, sexual dialogue and some language. Running time: 102 minutes.