Starring Gaspard Ulliel. In French and English, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

“I can’t get the tension right,” cries a harried seamstress, sobbing over her machine in Saint Laurent. That could be the moist complaint of director and cowriter Bertrand Bonello, who struggles mightily and almost succeeds in stitching together a credible portrait of the late high-fashion priest.

This is the second narrative feature lately to take on Yves Saint Laurent, who died in 2008. It roughly follows the contours laid out in 2010’s lazily titled L’Amour Fou, a doc about the tortured long-term relationship between the designer and Pierre Bergé, whose business acumen made YSL the brand it remains today. Bonello did well to give the lead role to Gaspard Ulliel, a rakish actor best known to non-French viewers as the young Mr. Lecter in Hannibal Rising. The resemblance is strong enough to allow him in the same room with a famous multiple portrait by Andy Warhol, the pop-art counterpart to Saint Laurent’s place in ’60s fashion.

Early scenes set the discordant tone of the period, with the screen split to shove YSL’s creative milestones up against chaotic events in Algeria, Vietnam, and the streets of Paris. But the film loses its juice once our horn-rimmed hero settles into his role as the anguished prince of haute couture. Saint Laurent’s increasingly drugged-out detachment from the world, and from Bergé (played by an underused Jérémie Renier), has some decadent allure—especially with a soundtrack that veers between Maria Callas and disco soul.

The film’s opulent visual style and eccentric pacing recall Italian directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Luchino Visconti, with that notion underlined by the presence of The Conformist’s iconic Dominique Sanda as YSL’s mother and The Damned’s Helmut Berger as the famed designer in his last days. The rise of every great artist is unique, but all falls look about the same. So Bonello distracts us with questionable time jumps and odd forays into the company’s byzantine business history. A hundred and fifty minutes of this requires a lot of dedication from the viewer.