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Here’s a cocktail for you — let’s call it the “Blonde.” Start with a base of biographical fiction, add three parts mid-century photography, a heavy dash of bitters, a wash of bad taste and top with a Lynchian float. You’ll have something that kicks hard, if leaving you somewhat worse for wear once the intoxicants run their course.

And to push this analogy further than needed, director Andrew Dominik’s long-awaited Marilyn Monroe biopic is somehow less about the actress and more about his own showmanship. Think of Dominik as a flair bartender.

Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, “Blonde” holds stardom to the light and finds nothing but an unending nightmare. If technically an adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel of the same name, the film uses that source as a launch pad, a framework on which to pin countless other inspirations, most of them visual.

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Clocking in at nearly three hours, this phantasmal riff on the life of movie star Marilyn Monroe will do for people with bad backs what its inspiration, Joyce Carol Oates’ 738-page novel, did for fragile wrists. By turns ravishing, moving and intensely irritating, Blonde is, by the end, all a bit much – in every sense.

Writer-director Andrew Dominik (best known for macho yarns such as Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) has forged Monroe’s story into Wagnerian-scale opera, except there’s no singing – apart from the bit where Monroe (Ana de Armas) rasps out Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. At least there’s a lush score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis to take up the musical slack,...