Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” marked the 50th anniversary of the grisly Manson murders with considerable panache . But it’s the other Manson movie released this year, the less ballyhooed independent “Charlie Says,” that feels timelier.

Directed by Mary Harron from a script by Guinevere Turner, “Charlie Says” surpasses “Once Upon a Time” in evoking the New Age fantasies and apocalyptic mentality of the late 1960s , partly because it plumbs the mind-set of Manson’s female followers.

Like Harron’s first feature, “I Shot Andy Warhol” ( 1996 ), a movie about Warhol’s would-be assassin Valerie Solanas, “Charlie Says” is a scrupulous work of pop scholarship resurrecting a larger-than-life character from the lunatic fringe of the ’60s counterculture, along with an era-defining celebrity crime.

As she did with her Warhol film, Harron starts “Charlie Says” with the aftermath of a sensational attack. Leslie Van Houten (Hannah Murray), renamed Lulu by Manson, who routinely rechristened his acolytes, is introduced showering off the blood of a couple she had just met and helped to kill. Her three other accomplices from the so-called Manson family, meanwhile, scarf down food in the kitchen of the murdered couple, Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.