A true story, in a kinda, sorta way

Three years after it was supposed to have come to a theater near you, “Prozac Nation” -- a movie based on the bestselling 1994 teenage-depression memoir by Elizabeth Wurtzel and starring Christina Ricci as the author -- makes its post-festival debut tonight on Starz!, the subscription movie channel with the name of a new wave band. Numerous theories have been advanced as to the reason for this delay, and comedown, including Wurtzel’s well-publicized, infelicitous remarks to a Canadian reporter on the subject of 9/11, which she had witnessed near at hand (“I had not the slightest emotional reaction.... It was a most amazing sight in terms of sheer elegance”), saying aloud things other people might have thought, but

What’s more likely is that the film, being not very good, was at last deemed to be not worth the money it would have taken to release it. (Directed by Norway’s Erik Skjoldbjaerg, who also made “Insomnia,” it was an independent production, acquired by Miramax, and the budget shows.)

Though it begins with those ominous three little words “a true story,” it is, of course, not. Like all memoirs, Wurtzel’s book is a sort-of true story, the story she “owns” and has reconstructed out of her necessarily imperfect recollections. The film, in which writers and directors and actors have imposed themselves, reshaping material for dramatic convenience and audience appeal, filtering Wurtzel’s already filtered views of herself and the people in her life, is necessarily less true -- a game of reality telephone. Which is not to say it doesn’t capture, in fleeting moments, some general truths about depression. But if this is a subject that interests you, you’d be better off with some clinical literature.

Or with Wurtzel’s book, which though long and tiresome, has at least the benefit of its tiresome length -- it covers her life over a period of a decade, while the movie focuses only on her first year at Harvard, as she deals with writer’s block, sex, drugs, unexpected visits from her loser father, prickly visits with her clueless but caring mother, and not feeling as pretty as she obviously is. (Ricci is conspicuously naked in one scene, to erase any doubt about that -- echoing, in a funny way, Wurtzel’s own self-marketing strategy, appearing, as she did, topless on the cover of her second book, “Bitch.”) It also paints a fuller, sharper picture not only of chronic anomie but of the relatively normal life she led inside it, alongside all the drawing in and acting out.

The film, which attacks you in bursts of temper, lacks that steady context and as a result Wurtzel comes across primarily as a needy whiner. Oddly, the filmmakers sometimes inflate mere asides from the book into major moments, even as they reduce Wurtzel’s heavily populated memoir into a few necessary iconic figures: the mother (Jessica Lange, who made her first great screen splash playing another woman of unstable temperament, Frances Farmer), the estranged father (Nicholas Campbell), the boyfriend (Jason Biggs), the girlfriend (Michelle Williams) and the therapist (Anne Heche). There is also Lou Reed singing “Sweet Jane” and “Perfect Day” and serving as the subject of (as it sounds here) an inchoate sex fantasy that, published in the “Harvard Crimson,” earned Wurtzel a 1986 Rolling Stone College Journalism Award.

As to the star, Ricci would seem perfectly cast, having evinced a certain neurasthenic appeal ever since “The Addams Family,” a quality that subsequent (never permanent) healthy weight gains and the occasional relatively normal-girl roles could never completely hide. And she’s good here, on a moment-to-moment basis, to the extent the script allows -- she seems upset when she’s supposed to seem upset, etc., and in their calmer scenes, she and Lange have a nice chemistry. (No such chemistry occurs with Biggs, however, with whom she was more plausibly mismatched in Woody Allen’s “Anything Else.”) But it’s ultimately a hopeless case.

Though the title “Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America” lends Wurtzel’s book a weight it doesn’t have -- as if it were the expression of a great social truth rather than, as she herself describes, “a memoir with no particular thesis or point ... only a small, personal tale of one girl’s mental hell” -- her writing clearly struck a nerve, held up a glass in which many people saw their own face. But the movie is merely a souvenir of the book, a reflection of its cracked glamour, and an expression of the culture’s endless fascination with the young, gifted and sick.

*

‘Prozac Nation’

Where: Starz

When: 9 p.m.

Ratings: Rated R for language, drug content, sexuality/nudity and some disturbing images.

Christina Ricci...Lizzi

Jason Biggs...Rafe

Anne Heche...Dr. Diana Sterling

Jessica Lange...Sarah

Michelle Williams...Ruby

Jonathan Rhys Meyers...Noah

Nicholas Campbell...Donald

Executive producers, Willi Baer, Avi Lerner, Danny Dimbort, Trevor Short, John Thompson. Director, Erik Skoldbjaerg. Screenplay, Galt Niederhoffer, Alex Orlovsky, Larry Gross and Frank Deasy. Based on the book by Elizabeth Wurtzel.