Leads fine escorts in 'Chaperone'

Louise Brooks is not supposed to be drinking. First of all, it's Prohibition, so no one is supposed to be drinking. Second, it's 1922, and she's barely 16. Third, her mother has entrusted her in the care of a chaperone, who has accompanied her to New York, so that Louise could stay safe while auditioning for a dance company.

So when the chaperone finds Louise in a speakeasy, we might expect the girl to be embarrassed. Instead she walks up to her minder, breathes into her face and says, "That's gin."

The contrast presented by "The Chaperone," now in theaters, is about more than two personalities. It's about two women on opposite sides of a pivot point in American social history. Norma (Elizabeth McGovern) is a middle-aged, Midwestern woman who has certain ideas about propriety and decorum. And Louise (Haley Lu Richardson), the future movie star, is part of the remarkable generation of young women that would soon be dancing the Charleston on tabletops and changing the country forever.

The film is based on Laura Moriarty's novel, and the story really is fiction, in that Norma is a made-up character, there to show what it might have been like for a 19th century woman to see, right in front of her, the freedom she unconsciously craves. Along the way, the script, written by Julian Fellowes, provides for a series of small, lively incidents that have fun presenting Brooks as a preternaturally mature and scarily perceptive wild woman in training.

As Brooks, Richardson does not disappoint. Facially, she looks nothing like the 1920s film star, but she has charm and assertiveness, and in every other way she looks just like her, so that when she's dancing in Ruth St. Denis' studio, you feel as though you're seeing the real thing. If there's a difference between Richardson and Brooks, it's that Brooks seemed more oblivious and...