Critic Reviews

Compared to the inherent compactness of “Dior and I” that crystallizes Dior’s collective craft and process under its new creative director Raf Simons, Halston is vast, and therefore, less of a thrill to watch than the real-life “Project Runway” challenge thrown at Simons. But it will be no less breathtaking for fashion enthusiasts, and anyone dwelling in the tricky intersection of art, history and commerce.

This film celebrates Halston’s work but shows more interest in the man — and the unexpected corporate drama — behind it.

Halston is at its most naturally energetic when highlighting career triumphs. It’s packed with archival footage remembering past glamour, and moving contemporary interviews with models like Pat Cleveland, whose own ascendance in the fashion world as one of the first African American models to make a name for herself, went hand in hand with Halston’s paradigm shift.

Unusual framing device aside, Halston is on balance a solid and affectionate tribute to an American original.

Even with its imperfections, the expansive scope of this tribute seems entirely fitting for an industry giant who put America on the global fashion map.

It would be easy to paint him as a tragic figure but Tcheng’s film is more of a celebration than a lamentation, saluting a superstar designer whose life was a triumph of style and substance.

Ignore the film’s foolish framing device and Halston emerges as a fascinating study of a fashion artist who allowed women to live an idealized vision of themselves.

It’s an understatement to say that Tcheng is drawn to this material. He revels in it. Yet he’s too clear-eyed to turn Halston’s story into a morality tale.

“I have a theory that less becomes more,” Halston purrs in one early interview. The opposite may well be true, and the same could be said for this documentary.

When it reverts to conventional documentary storytelling, then, “Halston” is thrilling stuff for fashion nerds, as well as a poignant character study of a misfit ultimately undone by an excessive hunger to prove himself.