Nearly decade in the making, director Ellen Kuras’s film about the life and enduring significance of photographer Lee Miller lands with the hefty thud of a passion project in awe of its subject.

The story unfolds within a frame, that of an interview with Miller (Kate Winslet), late in life and living in seclusion in an English farmhouse. The interviewer (Josh O’Connor, The Crown) is probing but deferential. Miller does not suffer fools, however.

Eventually, reluctantly, she opens up, and with that Kuras takes us into a flashback to the late 1930s, to the period when Miller transformed herself from model and Surrealist muse into the role for which she became famous: war photographer for British Vogue magazine.

Tracking through the “phoney war” months of 1939-40 and the Blitz, we watch Miller build a reputation capturing provocative, often female-centred images from the home front. But she’s determined to do more and to see more, however. After battling military brass for permission, she joins US and Allied forces on the push into Nazi-occupied Europe.

The film follows her, into liberated Paris (where she captures images of the harsh retribution meted out to women deemed collaborators), and then into Germany itself. Working alongside Life magazine...