“BOMBSHELL”

** 1/2

(R, 1:48)

In one of her first declarations in “Bombshell,” former Fox News star Megyn Kelly (portrayed uncannily by Charlize Theron) lays out exactly who she is. “I’m not a feminist,” she claims, “I’m a lawyer.”

That’s the tricky line walked in the film, which depicts the sexual harassment case brought by women at the network that toppled conservative news mastermind Roger Ailes in 2016. This isn’t an uplifting girl-power tale, or a comedy, or a thriller, though sometimes it seems like it could be all of those things. Rather, it is more challenging and genre- defying: a legal procedural about how to successfully report sexual harassment inside a cultlike conservative bureaucracy.

This is a spiky, morally complex tale that doesn’t ask the audience to love or even like the women at the center of the story, but to fully see they’re humans fighting to be treated as such (an inherently feminist concept even if they won’t claim it). Navigating the thorny ethics proves to be a tall order for audiences as Kelly, of “White Santa” fame, is hard to side with. Producer and star Theron knows this, and she doesn’t flatten her into one thing or the other. She’s an intense person, unabashedly ambitious and often arrogant. At one point, she says to her husband (Mark Duplass), “Tell me my big mouth didn’t ruin our life,” as he ruefully replies, “Not yet.”

This knotty depiction is at times at odds with the perspective of “Bombshell,” which attempts to be intimate yet broad. The characters address the camera as if to a friend, whispering asides like secrets to a confidant. We get access to their internal monologues, and sometimes we’re flies on the wall, witnesses to the chilling acts committed in Roger Ailes’ (John Lithgow) office. “Bombshell” wants the audience to contend with the all-too-real reality of their dubious political rhetoric and those consequences.

The film is at its strongest during the whispered interactions between the women of Fox, who are either victims or defenders of this system built on the degradation of women, or both. For too long, Kelly lands in that gray area. A scene between Kelly and young Fox News staffer Kayla (a composite character played by Margot Robbie) highlights Kelly’s own burden of responsibility in her failure to help prevent Ailes’ continued abuse. Buying into the culture of Fox have made her a star, but it was at the expense of her own and others’ abuse.

“Bombshell” doesn’t quite work if you’re looking for someone to like, although there are a lot of likeable actors in it, like Connie Britton as Ailes’ wife Beth and Malcolm McDowell as Fox News founder and mogul Rupert Murdoch. The guileless self- proclaimed “millennial evangelical” Kayla comes close. And Gretchen Carlson (Nicole Kidman), the very first to report Ailes after she’s fired armed with a detailed record of harassment, comes off well.

But this is Kelly’s movie, and with her at the center, “Bombshell” actively denies our natural desire for identification with a hero. She occupies a space that is hero, victim and at times, villain, and it’s a bold move for Theron to make Kelly as challenging as she is. “Bombshell” thus manages to be a fascinating depiction of the complexities of workplace sexual harassment and the legal ramifications that are necessary to contend with in the post-#MeToo era.