Jean Seberg (1938-79) began her career playing a martyr and ended it being one.

She was barely out of high school when she was plucked from Marshalltown, Iowa, and cast as the lead in Otto Preminger’s “Saint Joan” (1957). The movie was a catastrophe. Fleeing Hollywood, Seberg became the poster girl for the French new wave in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 “Breathless,” was exploited by her imperious husband, the French novelist Romain Gary, then, hounded to the brink of madness by the F.B.I. for her public support of the Black Panthers, she died at age 40, in an apparent suicide.

Ever since, the actress has been something of an artist’s muse. “Seberg,” the new Kristen Stewart vehicle, isn’t the first work to recount Seberg’s travails. Margia Kramer used her F.B.I. files as the basis for a 1981 video installation at the Museum of Modern Art; the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes took Seberg as the subject of a roman à clef, and the independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport made the most meta of biopics in his 1996 work, “From the Journals of Jean Seberg.”

Rappaport might be considered the original “VCRchaeologist,” using clips from old movies as a form of critical analysis. Following his 1992 experimental documentary, “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” “From the Journals” offers a mock subjective account of Seberg’s film career, blending onscreen performance with imagined autobiography and a soupçon of film theory. Mary Beth Hurt — a native of Marshalltown for whom the teenage Seberg actually babysat — stands in as the actress, annotating her movies from beyond the grave. “Who on earth would follow this drum majorette into battle?” she asks after watching a 17-year-old Seberg, brandishing a sword.

The voice is Hurt’s. The amused, snarky tone — Seberg refers to her torturous marriage to Gary as “a low rent version of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller” — belongs to Rappaport. Still, words can barely describe the humiliation Seberg suffered while playing her husband’s debased caricature in his exploitative feature “Birds in Peru” (1968), or the injuries, physical as well as psychological, she sustained filming “Saint Joan.”