Renée Zellweger in Judy (David Hindley/LD Entertainment/Roadside Attractions)

Renée Zellweger headlines this Judy Garland biopic, seamlessly blending her wide-eyed, vulnerable on-screen persona with the mannerisms and the ragged voice of the singer/actress in the twilight of her career. The Oscar-winning actress captures Garland’s swagger and droll comic timing, and though she is made up to look approximately like the entertainer, there are times when she startlingly appears to be a mirror image.

She also credibly belts out Garland standards, mostly from the second tier of the singer’s repertory, like “Come Rain or Come Shine” and “The Trolley Song.” More crucially, Zellweger sells the songs as monologues, and director Rupert Goold saves the best for last: Zellweger’s rendition of “Over the Rainbow,” which might produce a lump in the throats for viewers who grew up when The Wizard of Oz was a seasonal highpoint on broadcast television. However, the filmmakers can’t resist turning a melancholic high point into a British feel-good moment (the movie was co-produced by BBC Films).

The award-winning 2001 TV miniseries Life with Garland: Me and My Shadows, starring Judy Davis and Tammy Blanchard, followed Garland from her childhood in Minnesota to her 1969 death in London, while Tom Edge’s screenplay for Judy zeroes in on roughly the last six months of Garland’s life as the broke single mother takes on a five-week gig at London’s the Talk of the Town night club, solely to pay her bills and support her school-age children. Her eldest, Liza (Gemma-Leah Devereux), was at that point on her own. She bumps into her mother at a Hollywood party in the film’s beginning, where Garland first meets the wheeler-and-dealer Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), who would go on to become her fifth husband.

Shoehorned into the 1968 to 1969 time line are flashbacks to Garland’s MGM days as she is tormented by a predatory Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery), who towers over her, offering blunt dime store psychological assessments and emotionally manipulating his 16-year-old contract player (played by Darci Shaw). These scenes offer a glimpse of Garland’s history as the rising young star of The Wizard of Oz, who was making a mint of money for the studio in her pairings with then-superstar Mickey Rooney (Gus Barry), portrayed here as her unrequited teenage crush. She is also seen in pigtails popping pills, uppers to get her through a grueling 18-hour workday on a restricted diet and downers to offer her some rest. These reenactments are a bit clunky, but the entire film is smoothed over by the consistency of Zellweger’s work when it switches back to the late 1960s.

In 2012, British actress Tracie Bennett won a Tony for her tour-de-force performance of Garland for Peter Quilter’s play End of the Rainbow, which this film is rather loosely based on. In an angry performance that emphasized the entertainer’s drug addiction, Bennett portrayed Garland as a nonstop bolt of energy, a live wire constantly moving in the search for her next fix. Edge’s screenplay opens up the premise so that the movie bears little resemblance to the play’s text: her ex-husband and former manager Sid Luft (Rufus Sewell) threatens to permanently take custody of their two young children, and a backstage battle takes place night after night to make sure Garland, strung out or sober with stage fright, steps foot before the footlights.

Goold and Zellweger take a different approach than the play, presenting Garland in a softer light, as exhausted and running on empty, largely because of her insomnia. Still, Zellweger has a nervous energy that propels the film through the biopic’s expositional dialogue and one-liners.

Some may argue that this film adds little to the Garland canon, considering that there are multiple print biographies out there, beginning with Gerold Frank’s acclaimed 1975 biography Judy. If the movie needs a justification at all, it has that, in spades, in Zellweger’s exhaustive and soulful interpretation.