Anand Tucker's film takes its halved structure from its subject matter two sisters leading vastly different lives, yet still connected by a sibling bond. Hilary's half details how the older sister (Rachel Griffiths) goes from family star to an also-ran, choosing life with her husband and children when it becomes clear that Jacqueline (Emily Watson) has a lock on the limelight. Through her eyes, we see Jackie's fame explode. When Hilary welcomes her sister in full flight from media, marriage, and music, Jackie attempts to usurp her family life with the most intimate of emotional blackmail.

Then in Jackie's segment, we get a glimpse of why this heralded superstar of classical music might have behaved so badly. Whisked away on an endless international concert tour almost before her childhood is over, applauded by adoring audiences for every eccentric outburst of temper, in thrall to the cello that has made her famous and denied her the ordinary pleasures of life and love, Jackie has no chance at normality. The onset of multiple sclerosis in her prime steals even her ability to make music, reducing her to an object of pity as she bangs a drum during a children's concert.

While the true story of Jacqueline du Pre--according to the account by Hilary and brother Piers, on which this film is based--has plenty of conflict and controversy simply in its factual details, Hilary and Jackie isn't merely an interpretation of selected facts. Strongly cinematic, fantastical elements send tremors through the story's historical underpinnings: Cello strings vibrate in resonance with memory, elegant gowns wait in midair to be inhabited. Whenever the movie threatens to become too deeply mired in real events, the world of feeling and dreams that these images evoke reemerges to infuse the story with meaning.