Ana de Armas Digs Deep as Marilyn in Brutal ‘Blonde'

What a dream it must be to be Marilyn Monroe, a starstruck assistant tells her. “Everyone would give their right arm to be you!”

And we cringe, as we’ll do many times during Andrew Dominik’s brutal, bruising and often beautiful “Blonde,” starring a heartbreaking Ana de Armas. This time, it’s because we already know that Norma Jeane, the real person underneath, is giving so much more than her right arm to be Marilyn. An arm would be getting off-easy. She’s giving her body, her sanity, her dignity, her health and probably her very soul to be Marilyn.

There’s a lot that “Blonde,” written and directed by Dominik with some stunning cinematography by Chayse Irvin, is. Let’s first clarify what it isn’t.

It is not a biopic, not in a familiar sense. It is not chronological, nor an attempt at a complete account. Most crucially, it’s not factual — it’s based on a novel, “Blonde” by Joyce Carol Oates.

And as for the performance at its core — de Armas’ committed, fearless, leap of faith of a performance — well, it’s not an imitation. And so the complaints circulating about her accent, saying her native Cuban inflection sometimes peeks through, are absurd and irrelevant. De Armas digs so deep to play Marilyn, she could be speaking ancient Greek and it wouldn’t affect the emotional truth she finds here.

What “Blonde” IS is ambitious. Far-reaching, at times perhaps too far. And frequently gorgeous, especially in expertly rendered scenes of old-fashioned Hollywood glitz, mainly in black-and-white — the endless flashbulbs popping (and sounding like gunshots) on the red carpet, the fans ogling, their faces sometimes distorted by lust. There are wonderful recreations of scenes from movies like “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and “The Seven Year Itch.”