Lee review – Kate Winslet is remarkable as model turned war photographer Lee Miller

More than most people, the American photographer Lee Miller – played here by a fierce and committed Kate Winslet – understood the vulnerability of being a woman in front of a camera. A model since childhood (first for her father, a keen amateur snapper, then as a fashion model, then as a muse and artistic collaborator with the surrealist artist Man Ray), Miller learned about photography from both sides of the lens. She knew from experience that taking a picture can be a kind of theft, a one-way transaction in which the subject gives a part of themselves but receives very little in return.

This sobering, serious-minded partial biopic, which focuses on Miller’s stint as a war correspondent during the second world war, makes a case that her insight into the power dynamics of photography contributed to the extraordinary potency of her work. Her status as both a victim (her childhood rape is revealed in a jarringly clumsy exchange with her friend and employer, Vogue editor Audrey Withers, played by Andrea Riseborough) and a survivor brought her an unusual empathy with her subjects. She saw the micro-details of combat in a way that her male counterparts frequently overlooked – not just the role played by the unheralded everywoman on the street, but also the shame and humiliation felt by those whom the war had chewed up and spat out along the way. The directorial debut of American cinematographer Ellen Kuras (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), Lee is not the most formally daring or original biopic. It is, however, undeniably impactful: a woman’s-eye view of a photographer who cast a woman’s eye over the war and its aftermath.

It’s a remarkable performance from Winslet, who, while she’s a touch too old for the role (Miller was in her mid-30s when she covered the war), captures the spirit of the character: the brawling, confrontational tough-broad aspects of Miller’s personality, as well as her considerable magnetism. Winslet’s Lee is a woman who uses her words as weapons, delivered in a hardboiled screwball heroine’s rasp of a voice. It’s a voice that is employed extensively. A fictional interview device – a chain-smoking, whisky-swilling older Lee is interrogated by a younger man (Josh O’Connor) – provides a narration that ties together her war experiences.

But Winslet’s performance goes deeper than the “drinking, fucking and taking photographs” that Miller lists as her core skillset at the film’s opening, which unfolds at a bohemian pool party in France on the brink of war. She balances the tough-cookie determination that took Miller to a frontline that was, nominally at least, off-limits to women, with a sense of the psychological injuries she accrued.

Along with her friend and colleague, Life magazine photographer David E Scherman (Andy Samberg), Miller was one of the very first civilians to bear witness to the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps at Buchenwald and Dachau. What she saw there haunted her for the rest of her life – something that Winslet conveys in a single, wordless scene in which she sifts through her contact sheets, her ever-present cigarette burning down to its filter and a cloud gathering in her eyes.

Related: Kate Winslet insisted her film about Lee Miller must have female director

Not surprisingly given Kuras’s background as a cinematographer, Lee is largely visually driven. Adapted from the biography The Lives of Lee Miller, written by her son, Antony Penrose, the film also benefits from extensive access to Miller’s private archives, a gift of a resource for a film-maker that enables Kuras to see the world literally through the eyes of her subject. Notable photographs – some famous, some less so – are threaded organically through the film. Meanwhile, the use of colour – there’s a stark contrast between the frivolous, saturated hues of prewar life and the purgatorial greys of postwar Germany – gives a neat indication of Lee’s mental state at any given time.

The film’s soundtrack, however, is less successful. The score, by Alexandre Desplat, is a bustling, busy orchestral mulch, so generic that it might as well have been pulled out of a drawer marked “prestige period pieces”. When so much elsewhere in the picture makes such an effort to tap into the distinctive and highly unusual character of Lee Miller, the music choices feel throwaway and thoughtless in comparison.

• In UK and Irish cinemas