“A man lit a fire and put me on it,” the actress Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) curtly tells her lover, the activist Hakim Jamal (Anthony Mackie), in “Seberg,” a flawed and fascinating film about fame and martyrdom. She’s explaining the burn scars she suffered while playing Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger’s “Saint Joan” (1957), but the comment could as easily serve as this movie’s tagline.

Conflagration is a recurring motif. “You’re playing with fire,” Jamal warns, knowing the F.B.I. will notice her generous donations to civil rights causes and her association with the Black Panther movement. The year is 1968, and Seberg has left her home in Paris — as well as her husband, the writer Romain Gary (Yvan Attal), and their young son — to come to Los Angeles to audition for “Paint Your Wagon.” Her Black Power salute at the airport draws immediate attention, as does her nighttime visit to Jamal’s home in Compton wearing an arresting minidress and driving a sunshine-yellow convertible. Her actions seem less deliberately provocative than politically ingenuous, those of a woman unaware that her support for African-American rights will lead to the thorough violation of her own.