PRECIOUS DEFIANCE

Kristen Stewart's film, 'The Chronology of Water', is an appropriately awkward, non-commercial and impressionistic affair. We need more of this kind of thing, insists Xan Brooks

- Xan Brooks

Online critics were cock-a-hoop back in 2014 when Kristen Stewart - aka Bella Swan out of the Twilight movies - published a poem in Marie Claire magazine. Stewart was 23 at the time, old enough to know better and young enough not to care, and wore her literary influences (Kerouac, Bukowski, Tom Waits) a little too readily on her sleeve.

“My Heart is a Wiffle Ball/Freedom Pole” turned out to be a freestyle, impressionistic affair, apparently written during a cross-country road trip and fuelled by the excitement of cocky gilded youth. It contained such lines as “Through our windows boarded up/ He hit your flint face and it sparked,” and “Devil’s not done digging/ He’s speaking in tongues all along the Panhandle,” and the critical response ran the gamut from glee to scorn to pitying condescension. It should be noted that the actor didn’t especially help her cause by talking her readers through the creative process. “I don’t want to sound so utterly pretentious,” she said with a fleeting flash of self-knowledge. “But after I write something, I go, ‘Holy shit, that’s crazy.”

I’m expecting a similar reaction - glee, scorn and pity - to The Chronology of Water, Stewart’s labour-of-love feature directing debut, which is in cinemas in February. Her rites-of-passage drama is based on the 2011 memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch and stars Imogen Poots as a damaged, striving artist, but it’s essentially Wiffle Ball: The Movie, an extended piece of teen poetry, which proves that Stewart has learned nothing from the