HBO's most heavily hyped original movie since the similarly underwhelming The Josephine Baker Story, Gia tells the real-life story of Gia Carangi, a supermodel who embodied so many '80s excesses—drugs, promiscuity, androgyny, and, of course, being a supermodel—that it was perhaps inevitable that she would suffer a horrifying downfall. Carangi arrived in New York in the late '70s as a brash, vaguely punk, lesbian teenager, and proceeded to become one of the top fashion models in the business. But she remained, as illustrated in Gia, a surly, rebellious kid, a hellion so wild and nonconformist that at one point in the film, she actually opens a can of Tab with a switchblade. Such insouciance was not to be tolerated, at least not in the '80s, and Carangi soon fell victim to heroin addiction, unrequited love, poverty, unemployment, social banishment, and eventually a hideous AIDS-related death. In theory, it's a fascinating story, but co-screenwriter/first-time director Michael Cristofer and co-screenwriter Jay McInerney never really get a handle on their iconoclastic subject. Starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, Gia starts out as an unintentionally hilarious camp romp, the sort of overblown cautionary tale with which playwright-turned-screenwriter Cristofer (The Bonfire Of The Vanities, The Witches Of Eastwick) and novelist-screenwriter McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) made their names during the '80s. Things slow down a bit after Jolie rises to the top, as Gia focuses on Jolie's doomed relationship with uptight make-up artist Elizabeth Mitchell; their relationship would probably be a lot more powerful if it weren't filled with sex scenes filmed with the vaseline-coated soft-focus abstraction found in Zalman King films and Playboy videos. Toward its second half, Gia turns predictably grim and depressing, full of stagy scenes of characters tearfully reconciling with one another and embracing mortality. As the film's headstrong protagonist, Jolie performs with an entertainingly batshit conviction that keeps things from getting too boring. But Gia is still a missed opportunity, a morbidly stylish film that never really gets off the ground.