Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Radium Girls’ on Netflix, a Boilerplate Drama About the Girls Who Fought Big Radium

Two movies about irradiated women in one year? Sure, why not. Radium Girls — now on Netflix — follows slightly on the heels of Amazon’s Radioactive, a bio of Marie Curie, the groundbreaking scientist who discovered and thoroughly researched radiation. Radium Girls is led by Joey King of Ramona and Beezus fame (OK, The Kissing Booth too), playing a teenage employee of a corporation that’s slowly been poisoning its young female watch dial painters with radium — and she’s going to do something about that of course.

RADIUM GIRLS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Orange, New Jersey, 1925. Radium has been hailed by snake-oil salesmen as a cure for whatever ails you — nausea, cancer, impotence, ennui. Ennui? Yeah. Ennui. That’s what they say: ennui. And here we thought that was incurable. Seventeen-year-old Bessie (King) and her older sister Josephine (Abby Quinn) toil away at American Radium, where they paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium. It’s a lucrative business, as the watches are sold to soldiers who can see what time it is in the trenches and foxholes, and somewhere in here is a tasteless joke about death, so I won’t bother to search for it. Bessie and her co-workers are instructed to dab their paintbrushes on their tongues to speed along the process, which works in everyone’s favor — the more, the merrier for the company, and the women earn a penny per watch face.

Curiously, the girls’ elder sister was also employed at American Radium, and she passed away a while back — of syphilis, according to a doctor employed by American Radium. Hmm. Jo begins exhibiting strange symptoms including dizziness, aches and pains, and her teeth are falling out. The doc diagnoses her: syphilis it is! DOUBLE hmm. Consider the fact that she’s never had sex with anyone, and you can add a third hmm to that. Meanwhile, Bessie meets a nice fella named Walt (Collin Kelly-Sordelet), who introduces him to a group of politically aware artists and the like, which leads her to a consumer-protection organization, who get Jo in front of a doctor who has no ulterior motive. The diagnosis is grave. She has radium poisoning. It’s in her bones. She has two years to live.

Bessie and the ever-weakening Jo gather a few allies, also sickly or on their way to such, and lawyer up. It’s not an easy path. Their grandfather, whom they live with, is an ol’ coot who thinks they’re just a coupla dumb girls. Current American Radium employees don’t want to lose their jobs, and think the girls are full of shit and conspiracy theories. And American Radium itself is the type of goliath that can throw money at defense attorneys until those poor girls’ irradiated skeletons half-life into the soil. But Bessie will not be deterred. She’s up for the ups and downs of grueling litigation. And she has public opinion on her side — and the press too, who give the group a catchy name that will eventually make for a nice movie title sometime in the 21st century. No, it’s not The Women Who Took On the Man.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Radium Girls exists somewhere in the middling feminist-activist-bio ether along with Radioactive and Suffragette.

Performance Worth Watching: Joey King has been in tons of stuff since she changed the face of cinema with Ramona and Beezus. (No, seriously, Ramona and Beezus is wonderful!) So much stuff, she probably could’ve passed on this one — she does what she can, and the lush period fashion suits her well, but the material is sketch. But hey, Kissing Booth 3 coming later this year!

Memorable Dialogue: I never thought I’d hear Ramona Quimby say, “Our bones will glow forever, you know,” but here we are.

Sex and Skin: None. Syphilis, my ass.

Our Take: Radium Girls boasts good intentions but is tonally amateurish and poorly executed. The characterizations are bland, the dialogue rings trite and the drama is a squashed-flat trudge from one overly familiar plot point to the next. It has many components of a disease-of-the-week weeper, except the emotional authenticity that would make us weep. And then it becomes an Objection! Overruled! yawner of a courtroom drama. Drop one or two details about radium, and there’s nothing here to distinguish it from dozens of other movies of its ilk boasting strong-willed protagonists with their eyes on justice and shifty-eyed villains with their eyes on the bottom line.

Strange for a movie based on a true story, Radium Girls does not plaster the words “based on a true story” anywhere on the screen. It concludes with the usual text-explainer postscript telling us what happened next, though. The plot consists of major points plucked from a Wikipedia entry, then colors Bessie’s journey through it with Black characters who inspire her activism with their stories about inequity and police brutality. These moments are naught but a few crumbles of salt in a flavorless broth. The real Radium Girls deserve a better movie — one with richer characters, a better sense of the radium craze of the day (they skipped one chunk of the Wikipedia page) and a more rousing depiction of the feminist and worker’s-rights implications of the story. This one barely covers the bases and calls it good, and that just ain’t enough.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Didn’t cure my ennui.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Watch Radium Girls on Netflix