Discussions of post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly as it pertains to armed conflict, tend to focus on the soldiers. We’ve had dozens of narratives about young men grappling with harrowing memories: American Sniper, Stop-Loss, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. Of course, there are other people at the centers of those violent moments as well, rocked by war and yet, sometimes, unfathomably drawn back toward it.

A Private War tells the story of one of those people, foreign-war correspondent Marie Colvin—an intrepid Sunday Times reporter who was killed in a Syrian rocket attack in 2012. (The film is based on Marie Brenner’s feature story from this magazine.) Directed by documentarian Matthew Heineman, no stranger to war-torn lands himself, A Private War casts a bracingly intimate gaze, and yet sometimes has the tinny, expositional clank of based-on-a-true-story cinema.

As a study of the mechanics of war reporting, A Private War is only cursory. How sources are cultivated, access is granted, borders skirted and traversed is not really what Heineman’s film is concerned with. A Private War assumes (maybe correctly) that we need some kind of primer on where and what all of this is, which is where Arash Amel’s adaptation gets a bit awkward, characters explaining things to other characters who would certainly already know that information—these people would have a trenches shorthand that this film sometimes denies them. In avoiding the alienation that might come from just throwing us into the middle of things without explanation, A Private War slightly hobbles itself, stilted by a peppering of clichéd dialogue and grizzled aphorism.

But that stiffness gradually subsides, both because the script hones its intent—this is an engrossing and ultimately shattering character study, less a lecture on journalism or geopolitics—and because we become so ensnared by Colvin’s fraught gravitational pull. Colvin was a complex woman, guided by a kind of obsessive empathy that was underscored, or perhaps tragically entangled with, an addiction to chaos. She had such a hunger to see, which she then offset or justified (not incorrectly) by communicating what she found to the world. She saw hers as a mission fundamental to a functioning global consciousness—that victims of war should be so mourned, so cared for, so helped, so humanized in the individuality of their experiences.

Compelled into many hells by this deep conviction, Colvin suffered acute psychological trauma. In public, she was a heavy drinker, a carouser with a kind-when-it-counted gruffness. On her own, she was often crippled by bouts of anxiety and something darker, more ineffable. At least, that’s how she’s depicted, quite convincingly, in Heineman’s film. It’s a tricky part given rich texture by a go-for-broke Rosamund Pike, here finding the truly enveloping role she’s deserved since Gone Girl. (Really, since An Education.)

At first you worry that Pike’s voice, its odd mix of a put-on American accent and her native English one, is some actorly affect. But then you hear the real Colvin (who lived in London) talk, and it’s suddenly remarkable how close Pike gets it. Past those technicals, Pike deftly steers the storm and yaw of Colvin’s mental anguish. Amel’s script is maybe best when it considers the gradient of Colvin’s resolve. Her fierceness is never inhuman; she is not immune to vanity or need or personal concern. Colvin lost vision in one eye while embedded with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a fact that a lesser movie might address only to have its heroine triumphantly overcome it and then move on. Not so in A Private War, which adds Colvin’s injury to the fullness of its portraiture, and does not forget it. By the end of the film, we feel an intense closeness to Colvin, so completely has she been realized.

I didn’t know Marie Colvin. I’m sure those who did will find some inaccuracy, embellishment, or elision in this film. But as a discrete object, as a version of a person who was, A Private War is a robust, acutely moving film. I left feeling unnerved and inspired by Colvin’s compulsions—a bit shamed by them, too. How urgent she made the case for compassion, of the real, tangible, active kind. Her final report on the human-rights catastrophe in Syria was aimed at something more substantive than the fleeting, passive sympathy of the Western imagination. Colvin understood the grim difficulty of getting faraway people to really care.

A Private War does not position Colvin as any kind of savior, nor really as a martyr. She was, instead, someone who tossed herself into a fray to offer her services as witness and messenger, who died in a war along with so many unarmed others. As conflicts around the world continue to displace and murder millions, and some of us in far safer imperialist climes sit and wonder what’s to be done, A Private War gives testament to the power of Marie Colvin’s troubled, remarkable life: in all that madness and horror, she gathered the fury of her mind and did what she thought she could.

— Steven Spielberg’s new West Side Story will go back to basics

— TV shows suggest a witch can’t be both powerful and good—but why?

— Podcast and TV fixations converge with a new revolution

— The highs and lows of fame for Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman

— The myth of Megyn Kelly

Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.