Olivier Dahan directs a new biographical drama about legendary French singer Edith Piaf, known as "The Little Sparrow." The drama is suggestively (and ironically) named "La Vie en Rose." Marion Cotillard plays the preeminent French singer.

"I was not so nervous, just because when I heard about Piaf, I didn’t know many things about her and her life. When I started to discover who she was, I felt something quite close. The fact that she was an icon didn’t scare me," Cotillard told NewsWeek.

Cotillard manages to pull a great, convincing performance, but the movie has its serious flaws. The one that comes up most frequently is the evident lack of Piaf's most notable headlines: her affair with the young Yves Montand, her role in the French Resistance.

Gerard Depardieu plays Louis Leplée, who hired Piaf, then a street performer, for her first gig. He was the one who gave her the nickname "La Môme Piaf" or "the little sparrow."

Piaf was abandoned by her parents and was raised at a brothel in Normandy, ran by her grandmother. From the age of three to seven Édith was allegedly blind as she suffered from conjunctivitis, and from eight to fourteen she was allegedly deaf. Piaf had a child at around 17 with a delivery boy, a little girl named Marcelle, who died in infancy of meningitis.

Louis Leplée discovered her around 1935, convinced her to sing and produced her first record. From then on, her career took off. Her signature song, "La vie en rose," was written in 1945. The movie's producers appropriately chose the song's name for the drama, as it ironically suggests her tragic life and death. The peak of her fame was between 1955-1962 when she sang concerts at the famed Paris Olympia concert hall.

In 1951 she was involved in a car accident, and thereafter had difficulty breaking a serious morphine addiction. At the early age of 47, Piaf died of cancer at Plascassier, on the French Riviera, on October 11, 1963. Piaf was denied a funeral mass by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris because of her inappropriate lifestyle.

Piaf helped to produce fake passports for 150 French prisoners, which some have managed to use to escape. It is believed that many former Resistance members owed their lives to her.

Of all this tumultuous life, the movie focuses alternately on Piaf's final drug-addled days, her exhilarating rise to fame and her quasi-Dickensian childhood. I rate the 2h 20min biopic around 6/10.