This powerful and poignant screen biography of Isadora Duncan is directed by Karl Reisz. Based on her autobiography and Sewell Stokes' account of her life, this film vividly captures and conveys the whirlwind existence of this free spirit. Vanessa Redgrave gives a towering performance as Isadora, a woman whose career and private life were tumultuous. We see her as a romantic girl; an avant-garde artist whose work shocked and stunned audiences in Europe and America; a lover of famous men; a mother out of wedlock; a vagabond; an educator who wanted to give children a sense of what it meant to have open minds and unfettered bodies; and a tired woman in her forties, betrayed by age and her own excesses. Isadora pays tribute to a self-made woman who always went to extremes. In an essay, Joseph Epstein said of a friend of his: "To be with him was almost always to be reminded of life's larger possibilities, which is a service provided by people who are original for the rest of us." Isadora was in her time — and on the screen as well — an original for all of us.