

She told the audience that Telluride was the best festival, and that she’d never had more fun making a movie. She was convincing as Joan Jett, in the 2010 bio-pic “The Runaways,” and as Marylou, the sixteen-year-old bride of Dean Moriarty, in the 2012 adaptation of “On the Road.” Now she was playing a different misfit, the twentieth century’s most famous princess. She seems to channel a lineage of countercultural American femininity: rockabilly girls and punkettes, Beat poets and skaters, Jordan Baker rather than Daisy Buchanan. Stewart, who was born and raised in Los Angeles, describes herself as California to the core-she has “L.A.” tattooed on a wrist-and few people since James Dean have looked better or more at ease in a T-shirt and jeans.

Her look was nineteen-fifties suburban dad: a black-and-white cabana shirt over a cropped white tank top, blue jeans, red suède creepers, white socks. She stopped at a hotel to change and have her dyed blond hair styled in a messy updo, then went directly to the Werner Herzog Theatre, along with Pablo Larraín, the movie’s director, arriving only a few minutes behind schedule. The first reviews of her performance (“ ‘Spencer’ Stuns Venice, Earning Standing Ovation and Oscar Buzz”- Variety) were published as she slept above the Atlantic. This year, Kristen Stewart flew to Colorado from Venice, Italy, where “Spencer,” a new movie in which she plays Princess Diana, had just premièred. The town’s film festival, held each year during the Labor Day weekend, has a reputation for intimacy-celebrities are not subjected to red carpets or corsetry, and the looming mountains have a way of making Hollywood seem garish and far away. The airport in Telluride, Colorado, is small and private.
