Review: 'Lee' provides a portrait of a woman at war and battling demons, and gives Kate Winslet a juicy role to bite into

If the photojournalist and war correspondent Lee Miller hadn’t existed, Kate Winslet would have to commission a screenwriter to invent her — because the title character of director Ellen Kuras’ biopic “Lee” is the sort of prickly, free-spirited person that Winslet excels in portraying.

Kuras introduces Lee Miller in the middle of a war zone, as she rushes to a bunker while trying to work her camera. She snaps images of the violence and carnage going on around her, often oblivious to the bullets and bombs around her until she’s literally knocked off her feet by one.

The story then cuts ahead to 1977, in a farmhouse in the UK, where Lee is barely tolerating questions from a young interviewer (played by Josh O’Connor, from “Challengers”). The interviewer has a stack of Lee’s photos, and is seeking the story behind each one. Those stories form the backbone of the script, credited to Liz Hannah (“The Post”) and the team of Marion Hume and John Collee. 

Lee’s memories start in 1938 in the French countryside, where she’s enjoying a seemingly endless — and for some of her friends, topless — luncheon, talking with artist friends about creativity and life and, oh, that awful man Hitler that the Germans have made leader. (The acting talent in this one scene is impressive, including both Marion Cotillard and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” star Noémie Merlant.)

It’s in this sunny French setting that the American-born Lee meets Roland Penrose (Alexander Skarsgård), a gallery owner and sometime painter. Within hours, they’re in bed together. Within months, they’ve relocated to London, just as Hitler’s Nazis have invaded Poland and World War II has started.

Roland, a conscientious objector, employs his painting skills to test new types of camouflage paint — sometimes using Lee’s bare breasts as a canvas. Lee, a former model turned photographer, looks for a job with Vogue’s UK edition, where she’s hired by editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) over the objections of the magazine’s chauvinist fashion director, Cecil Beaton (Samuel Barnett).

Lee wants to use her photography to help in the war effort — so she asks Audrey to assign her as a war correspondent to Europe. After fighting layers of bureaucratic sexism, she ends up paired with another Yank, Life magazine reporter/photographer David E. Scherman (Andy Samberg, doing well in a rare dramatic role). Together they chronicle the later years of the war, from the liberation of France through the fall of Berlin. (Famously, Lee and David snapped a photo of Lee taking a bath in Hitler’s rest room.) 

They also press on to follow up on reports of thousands of missing Europeans, mostly Jews. They end up bringing back the first harrowing images from the concentration camps. The challenge for Lee is whether British censors or a public wanting to move on from the horrors of war will want to see them.

It’s appropriate that Kuras, making her feature directing debut after decades as the indie world’s go-to cinematographer, is telling the story of someone who made images to shake up the world. Kuras seems to know instinctively what Lee Miller discovered, that a photograph has two moments of connection — one between the subject and the shooter when the shutter is snapped, and one between the printed image and the viewer to learns something about the subject and the photographer.

Winslet gives one of the stronger performances of her stellar career. She finds within Lee both the flinty edge that drove her to push into areas women weren’t allowed to go and the vulnerability that allowed her to capture images no one else could make. Those contradictions, among many, are what made Lee Miller a chronicle of horrors — and they’re what make “Lee” an intense and satisfying biography.

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‘Lee’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 29, in theaters. Rated R for disturbing images, language and nudity. Running time: 117 minutes.