An eternal “it girl” — charismatic, original and ahead of every curve right up until she died this year aged 78 — British singer-songwriter-actor Marianne Faithfull receives a fulsome, loving tribute with sui generis cinematic whatsit Broken English.

A fittingly weird and wacky portrait of a woman whose career was full of swerves and swoops, this feature flutters between docu-style, seemingly unrehearsed conversations with Faithfull herself in her last months; reflections on her legacy from a studio of female intellectuals; covers of her songs by eminent admirers (such as Beth Orton and Courtney Love); and little bits of staged and written dramatic vignettes, performed by the likes of Tilda Swinton, George MacKay, Sophia Di Martino and Zawe Ashton among others, all pretending to be bureaucrats employed at the Ministry of Not Forgetting.  

In other words, it’s a lot like 20,000 Days on Earth, the directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s breakout feature about singer-songwriter Nick Cave and his collaborator Warren Ellis (both appear here too), another kooky-compelling blend of doc, performance and flights of fancy, with a big dollop of gutsy pretension.

As with nearly every film homage to a significant figure in the arts, the mileage of viewers’ affection will vary according to how much they’re pre-sold on the artist’s oeuvre in general. Even though Faithfull has been in the public eye since the mid-1960s, when she broke out as a singer/actor/counterculture poster girl, she probably doesn’t have the same solid, fervent fan base that Cage has, an audience built up over years of consistently dispensed albums and tours.

That said, the diversity of media Faithful has worked in (theater, film, recorded music) and the range of musical genres she’s explored over the years (rock, folk, New Wave, Kurt Weill, jazz, spoken word and more) probably means she has the more eclectic and diverse fan base. And that’s before you get to people seduced mostly by her protean public image as it played out in the tabloid press — a long slow evolution from ingenue to bohemian belle to debauched grande dame and back.

While skittishly edited, the film nevertheless builds up Faithfull’s biography in basic chronological order. The scripted sections, with all those name actors playing fictional civil servants, don’t always mesh effectively with the more spontaneous, doc-style interludes, but they serve to clarify the timelines and relationships and add editorial gloss.

That’s the job mostly of Swinton’s Overseer, seen on her own mostly in a studio set wearing a suit and tie, recording thoughts about Faithfull into a Dictaphone as if for future transcription. MacKay, on the other hand, has double duty with his role as the Record Keeper. Sometimes he’s reading through old-fashioned card files and muttering to himself, but mostly he serves as Faithfull’s onscreen interviewer, establishing a charming rapport with her that suggests chat-show host could be a future career option for him.

To be sure, he acquits himself better as an interlocuter than some of the interviewers we see in archive clips, including legendarily prurient prober Terry Wogan and a rather rude Tony Wilson. Faithfull takes everything in stride, and in the clips with MacKay that luminous smile hardly ever breaks even though it’s clear that time and COVID had taken their toll on Faithfull by the end.

Watching the archive material, she mostly seems amused by her younger self, and all the outrageous antics of her years of peak fame, like the infamous time she was arrested at Keith Richards’ house, Redlands, while wearing only a fur rug, or the time she met Bob Dylan, captured on film by D.A. Pennebaker for his doc Don’t Look Back. At one point, MacKay shows her a recently rediscovered clip of her singing Weill songs with a symphonic orchestra, her voice in particularly good form. What does she think, he asks. “I wish I’d worn lipstick,” comes the giggly, nonchalant reply.

Most of the stations of Faithfull’s cross also get visited here, including the overdoses and struggles with addiction, breakups, a miscarried child, and spells when she was clearly being exploited by others who were happy to use her notoriety to their own advantage. All the same, Faithfull is hesitant in the film’s present to castigate anyone too much, and like so many other women of her generation, she wears her trauma lightly like a casually tied scarf. The intellectuals pulled in by Forsyth and Pollard to discuss her legacy in what looks like a BBC radio recording studio, everyone wearing headphones, are the ones who parse the deeper meanings of the Faithfull, her iconicity as a sex symbol, notorious junkie or comeback kid.

If all that is a little too cerebral, viewers can wait out the pontificating until the next performance comes along. Some of the covers are inevitably stronger than others. Orton’s stripped down As Tears Go By is one standout, as is the dance-forward rendition of Why’d Ya Do It? performed by Jehnny Beth. Of course, the emotional climax of the film is the last song, Misunderstanding, sung by Faithfull herself with support from Cave and Ellis, a beautiful, wrenching ballad that takes maximum advantage of the cracked timbre of Faithfull’s mature voice. It was her last performance ever recorded, and it serves as a lovely, weathered gravestone for a rich and full life.