On July 15, 1974, as President Nixon was being driven from office, a 29-year-old TV journalist in Sarasota, Florida, interrupted her morning talk show for a dramatic announcement. “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts, and in living color, we bring you another first,” Christine Chubbuck told her viewers. “Attempted suicide.” She then pulled out a .38 revolver and shot herself in the back of the head. Chubbuck died 15 hours later, the first person ever to commit suicide on live TV and, according to popular myth, the inspiration for Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves, in Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976). A new drama, Christine, chronicles the last few weeks of Chubbuck’s life, with a heartrending performance from Rebecca Hall in the title role. Interviewed for the movie’s press notes, Hall is quick to connect Chubbuck to her era: “There’s this woman who’s in a state of nervous breakdown and there’s also a nation in a state of nervous breakdown. And it felt to me in many ways about America in the mid-70s as much as that one woman.”

Despite Hall’s cultural reading of the story, her real accomplishment is taking us deep inside a guarded personality: her giant eyes are like a pair of TV screens broadcasting Chris’s need, anxiety, and hopelessness. Chubbuck lived with her mother and older brother, and according to an August 1974 feature in the Washington Post, she had no close friends. “She was a strange combination of someone who at once wanted, needed desperately, the support and friendship of others and in another way rejected others out of a sense of defensive pride,” wrote reporter Sally Quinn. In the newsroom Chris can be a fierce combatant, slicing and dicing Mike, but a different person emerges during her volunteer shifts at a hospital for mentally disabled children, where she performs a series of gentle and disarmingly wise puppet shows. “I thought people were supposed to like me for who I am,” complains one of her characters, just after Chris has clashed with Mike. “They are,” replies her other character. “But you have to show them who you are. . . . You put on nice clothes and you wake up every day and you tell people who you are.”

Directed by Antonio Campos