I intended to review or at least riff on Noah Hawley‘s Lucy in the Sky (Fox Searchlight, 10.4) after seeing it earlier this week. But I couldn’t get it up. I began to check my watch around the 40-minute mark, and after a while I faced the fact that I was shrouded in boredom. Which was partly due to the fact that half the time I couldn’t understand what Natalie Portman, as the high-strung, love-struck astronaut Lucy Cola, was saying.

Cola is based upon notorious ex-astronaut Lisa Nowak, who flipped out when her fellow astronaut lover William Oefelein, whom the married-with-children Nowak had been seeing for a couple of years, took up with the younger Colleen Shipman. The screenplay (by Hawley, Brian C. Brown and Elliott DiGuiseppi) is an attempt to enoble Nowak’s bizarre saga as something more than the result of jealousy and a manic personality — it tries to explain her apartness and disorientation as a spiritual result of having been on a prolonged space mission.

“I just feel a little off,” Portman/Cola says at one point. “You go up there, you see the whole universe. And everything here looks so small.”

I’m sorry but there’s just no caring for what she’s going through. I wanted to leave before the one-hour mark. “What does this have to do with me,” I was asking myself. “She’d rather be floating hundreds of miles above earth…okay. But why do I have to deal with her issues? I got enough aggravation. And is it really that hard to speak clearly so that hearing-impaired idiots like myself can understand what she’s saying?

But I love Portman’s current hair styling, or at least as she appeared the other night on Jimmy Fallon. And I was thinking to myself that if Lucy Cola’s hair looked this good (as opposed to her awful Dorothy Hamill soupbowl) I would have felt more sympathy for Lucy Cola’s plight. I’m sorry but these things matter.