Fall TV Preview

Premieres: September 19, 9pm

Network: Lifetime

Who Is In It? Joan Allen, Jeremy Irons, Tyne Daly

Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons? On Lifetime? In a biography of America’s most celebrated female artist? Surprised? Then you haven’t been paying attention to the network’s studious evolution from purveyor of entertaining fluff to that of thoughtful, fact-based films that have lured the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Malcolm McDowell, Sigourney Weaver — and now this remarkable pairing, most recently seen together in Impressionism on the Broadway stage. A makeup-less Allen (who also executive produces) is fiercely luminous as the Wisconsin-born O’Keeffe, and her effortless chemistry with Irons’ charismatic Alfred Stieglitz is the showpiece of the film, even as the latter teeters distractingly close to a cape-sweeping caricature toward the film’s end. Tyne Daly is bracing as O’Keeffe’s momentary tormentor-turned-lifelong-friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, the socialite who first introduced O’Keeffe to her beloved Taos. Though O’Keeffe-ophiles may grump that the film — originally optioned by HBO — occasionally smudges the line between fact and fiction, it is nonetheless a stunningly crafted, beautifully detailed love song to the oft-contentious, occasionally cruel and utterly unbreakable bond between the plainspoken artist and the eccentric, New York-based photographer who was the love of her life.