TV and movies are genre-hopping like never before, and today a new level of creative anachronism has emerged in films and shows like Wild Nights with Emily, Sister Aimee, and Apple TV+’s Dickinson. These titles take a feminine perspective and a historical figure and combine them with charming, borderline-coy modern preoccupations and conjecture. Radium Girls uses the same formula, and therein lies its fatal mistake: the approach works just fine for a yarn about poetry and romance but not for a grim tale of a toxic workplace, corporate cover-ups, and a tragic early death.

One wants to root for Radium Girls, as its account of deceit and indifference rings sadly true today. Teenage sisters Josephine (Abby Quinn) and Bessie Cavallo (Joey King, lately renowned as a star of the “Kissing Booth” romantic comedies) work in a 1920s New Jersey factory alongside other young women, painting clocks with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. Radium is touted as something of a beauty aid and miracle potion, and the factory workers are even encouraged to lick the ends of their brushes to get the paint on straight. Dutiful Josephine begins to sicken rapidly, and the sisters suspect something’s not right when a shifty company doctor shames Josephine with a syphilis diagnosis, even though she’s a virgin. Will the Cavallos be able to expose radium’s health hazards, organize the factory workers, and get their day in court before Josephine passes away? 

The film’s uneasy touch and air of remove makes it hard to get wrapped up in these questions. It has a blown-out digital look that recalls documentary re-creations on TV, and the dropped-in black-and-white archival footage of suffragette and union protests only doubles down on the docudrama feel. (It doesn’t help that the herky-jerky clips sometimes bristle with more energy than the actual movie.)

Plotlines meander into all sorts of extraneous business, introducing Communists for a split second into the narrative and putting admonitions about Native American rights and slave labor into characters’ mouths. The script milks some poignancy out of the tender relationship between the sisters and depicts the pressure they are under, but imprecise characterizations fall short of making us feel their plight.

And finally, the style of acting adds another distracting element. King and Quinn come across as highly self-conscious as they deliver mannered line readings: arch, prim, or sassy. The sisters’ plight is one of life and death, pitting truth against falsehood, but the performances don’t communicate a sense of the stakes. In the end, the breach between the movie’s noble intentions and its tentative methods may be too much for Radium Girls to overcome.