The newspapers of New York saw them as embodiments of the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties: young, rich, beautiful, and energetic. After the success of his first novel This Side of Paradise (1920), the Fitzgeralds became celebrities. She was an icon of the 1920s-dubbed by her husband 'the first American Flapper'. Best of all are Christina Bennett Lind and Natalie Knepp as sisters and fellow Montgomeryites Tallulah and Eugenia Bankhead, the series’ cloche-hatted Greek chorines, always in a state of snide amusement, however inappropriate the situation.Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, born Zelda Sayre, was a novelist and the wife of writer F. Vincent Millay, looking down her nose at almost everyone she meets. Lucy Walters splendidly embodies poet Edna St. Jim True-Frost brings famed book editor Maxwell Perkins to nerdy, lightly scolding life. David Strathairn is entertainingly stoic and disapproving as Zelda’s father Judge Anthony Sayre. The supporting cast, fortunately, is a full-on delight. But he nonetheless makes a good physical foil for Ricci - the blond, blue-eyed chopping block into which she can wield her axe-like witticisms and insults. He’s hardly credible as an impassioned, voice-of-his-generation author (the series is least convincing when it shows him nervously navigating NYC’s critic, gossip columnist and publisher circles).

Hoflin, an Alexander Skarsgård clone if ever there was one, has little to do beside look arm-candy handsome at her side. Can Corey Stoll reprise his Papa from Midnight in Paris?) This is in every way a tailored star vehicle, but the actress throws herself fully into every scene, playing up Zelda’s the-world-bows-to-me! aggressiveness, while always hinting at the aching, delicate spirit underneath. (This Zelda really does need to cut loose in Paris with Ernest Hemingway. It would certainly be a shame if Ricci didn’t get to more fully explore her character’s rawer facets. There’s only so long she’s willing to play second fiddle, and there are hints in the first season’s final stretch of the dark emotional places the series may go should it continue. Scott attempts to complete work on his second novel and Zelda becomes increasingly restless. The middle section of the series has a woozy, endless-party feel to it that culminates in a recreation of one of the more famous Zelda incidents involving a drunken spin in a revolving door.įrom there, the couple escape to a seaside hideaway where F. Scott is riding high following the publication of his first novel This Side of Paradise, passages of which (as with much of his work) were appropriated from or inspired by Zelda’s own letters and diaries. So the show finds a nice groove about halfway through, after husband and wife settle in Roaring ‘ 20s Manhattan and proceed to tear the town apart. Scott’s relationship is less about devoted romance, more about dizzy co-dependency.

Za novel of zelda fitzgerald