AllMovie

JJ Martin's film about supermodel and heroin addict Gia Carangi is a powerful and very personal look at the beautiful but deeply troubled young woman's life. It may seem a bit belated. After all, Carangi died in 1986, 16 years before Martin's film was released. She'd already been the subject of several TV specials and one widely seen cable biopic. But Martin's film delves a little deeper into Carangi's world than those previous efforts. Through rare footage of Carangi and fascinatingly telling interviews with her drug counselor, Robert Hilton, and heroin-loving screenwriter Zoe Lund (who co-wrote Abel Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant, and died before this film was released), the film cannily explores the allure of heroin use and the perils of addiction while never losing its focus on Carangi's personal experience. The film rightfully decries the impact of involvement in the fashion industry on a young woman's psyche. It's clear that the rapid escalation of Carangi's heroin use was fueled, at least in part, by her profound contempt for the industry she was a part of -- her inability to be what her bosses and her public needed her to be without deadening her soul. But Martin never loses sight of Carangi's own responsibility for her fate and her inability to control her ravenous appetite for sex and drugs. The Self-Destruction of Gia opens with a long shot of a simple photo of Carangi at the height of her modeling career, and after a minute of looking at this single image, it begins to seem like we can read Carangi's tragic story in her gorgeously glum features. Carangi's wild beauty is part of the story. Our projection is, to a large extent, what Martin's film is about.