Starring Natalie Portman. Rated 14A

Just in time for the worst moment in U.S. presidential history comes this stylish look back at when things went terribly wrong.

John F. Kennedy’s shocking assassination, on November 22, 1963, ushered in a decade of war, riots, and targeted killings of politicians and civil-rights leaders, from which the nation has never really recovered.

It also capped a period of hope, represented by Kennedy and his beautiful young wife, Jacqueline Bouvier. Jackie finds fine-boned Natalie Portman playing the broad-featured First Lady, caught in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. She gives a commanding performance, even if it sometimes rings as a child’s well-studied attempt at wearing Mother’s finest—with just the right amount of debutante breathiness.

The film suggests that Jackie herself believed in the myth of Camelot; she plays the LP soundtrack to the then-popular musical while waltzing around the big house she’ll soon have to vacate. That’s one of several on-the-nose touches marring a mostly thoughtful script by TV-news veteran Noah Oppenheim.

He built the tale’s architecture around several recorded interviews, including Jackie’s famously gracious CBS tour of the White House, neatly reenacted here, with Greta Gerwig as an assistant displaying unexplained closeness.

Later, Jackie must cope with the rapid accession of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson. (John Carroll Lynch is thrown away here, but Beth Grant is a dead ringer for Lady Bird Johnson.) And there’s a big tussle over her wishes for a big, public funeral, with that cause championed by brother-in-law Bobby, played by slightly miscast Peter Sarsgaard.

This decision is questioned by an unnamed journalist (a Brylcreemed Billy Crudup), grilling Jackie soon after her retreat to Hyannis Port. The brittle, adversarial tone of their exchange helps drive the “story”, even if it wholly contradicts the tone of the Life magazine piece that was produced in reality, written by trusted family friend and JFK’s official biographer, Theodore H. White.

More troubling is the decision by Chilean director Pablo Lorrain (who made Neruda and No) to chop up his beautifully shot material—itself artfully blended with period footage—into a long, fragmented montage that eschews chronology to little narrative advantage.

How about just telling the story straight, while we still can?