OSCAR BUZZ, "It" girls, and test screenings are odd associations to be placed on Susanna Kaysen's Girl, Interrupted, a 1993 memoir about her experiences in a mental institution. For those of us who clutched this book to our chests, reading and rereading with gnawed cuticles and moist eyes, it's difficult to imagine Kaysen's journal-like, episodic book as a glitzy Hollywood film.

Director and screenwriter James Mangold (Cop Land, Heavy) makes an authoritative attempt, offering us a flawed, but surprisingly faithful version of Kaysen's struggles with emotional turbulence. Young, distracted Susanna (Winona Ryder) is all darting eyes and raw skin, suffocating in stiff, suburban Massachusetts during the late '60s, where good manners, arbitrary decisions, and her mother's plans for a "good future" overwhelm and depress her.

An attempted suicide later, Susanna is promptly sent to Claymoore -- a mental institution where she is expected to recover discreetly, far from the eyes of her parents' friends. Ryder gives a convincing performance, though her acting feels familiar and predictable (the fragile posture, the stammers, the slightly stunned expression). It's the amazing and completely believable supporting cast -- Clea Duvall as a pathological liar, Brittany Murphy as a sexually abused anorexic, Elisabeth Moss as a girl who tried to burn her face off, and Angelina Jolie as a sociopath -- that breathes life into an otherwise dreary, self-indulgent hospital stay.

Jolie's much-hyped performance is compelling for obvious reasons: She gets to strut around, pick fights, push buttons, and generally act like an asshole. But despite Jolie's fascinating, sexy screen presence and the touching interactions between Ryder and the girls, it feels as if Mangold had difficulty shaping these beautiful, loaded scenes into a fluid whole. Constructing a great beginning and satisfying end, he fumbles around in the middle, unnecessarily insisting on maintaining an active plot. Ultimately, Girl, Interrupted ends up being just a pretty, yet jumbled smudge of painful moments, funny sentences, and sudden realizations.