Beyond the Sea
I knew almost nothing about the singer and actor Bobby Darin before sitting through Kevin Spacey's new film about him. And having seen ''Beyond the Sea," all I can really tell you is that he sure did act a lot like Spacey.
The Darin Spacey creates is smug, sarcastic, and condescending, just like a lot of the characters Spacey has played. About ''Splish Splash," this movie's Darin says, ''Listen to the lyrics. They're very profound." You can half-imagine the depressed dad Spacey played in ''American Beauty" whining the same thing.
Darin found early fame in the 1950s as a teenybopper, but his real ambition was to be a bigger star than Frank Sinatra. So he turned his nose up at nascent rock 'n' roll, choosing to do ballads and more adult material, recording some memorable songs, including ''Dream Lover," and his signature pop versions of ''Beyond the Sea" and ''Mack the Knife."
Spacey, a lifelong fan of Darin, directed and produced the movie and sings the songs. To promote the film, he's even toured the United States with a band, in Darin's image.
The script of ''Beyond the Sea" is your standard biopic boilerplate, with a lot of self-reflexive hokum, including narration from Spacey's Darin. It presents his life as a film in production, and within 15 minutes we're introduced not only to the adult Darin but also to little William Ullrich, who plays him as a child. When the adult Darin gets some personal fact wrong, young Darin calls out corrections from a fire escape on the soundstage, inspiring the grown-up star's manager (John Goodman) to observe to him, ''we've got a miniature version of you, and he's a Method actor." To say the least: Ullrich is a talented, scarily mature man-child who makes Haley Joel Osment seem like a baby.
We're taken back to Darin's childhood in the Bronx, where he was born a sickly kid named Walden Robert Cassatto. His single mother (Brenda Blethyn) filled him with a love of performance. Naturally, Darin hits it big, and the separation between his family life and his career is virtually nonexistent, with his sister (Caroline Aaron) and her husband (Bob Hoskins) in his entourage. In one crude but imaginative transition, we're whisked from his mother's funeral straight to his appearance on a TV variety show.
Occasionally this insistence on artifice actually makes ''Beyond the Sea" interesting. Darin winds up pitching woo to the teenage goody-goody Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth) in an ebullient musical sequence that wouldn't be out of place in a Jacques Demy picture. But the movie has so many other tones and genres up its sleeve that you can almost see the Wite-Out from the movie's uncredited writers on the screen. The film's only consistencies are Andrew Law's psychologically evocative production design and the magnificent photography by Eduardo Serra.
Had Spacey made ''Beyond the Sea" 10 or 15 years ago, it might have been close to transporting. At 45, however, Spacey is older than Darin was when he died in 1973 during open-heart surgery. So watching his attempts to bounce with the youthful zest of a 24-year-old suggests some brutal wishful thinking. The film often exposes the actor as an entertainer whose vanity borders on the Streisandian. Where Jamie Foxx disappears inside his Ray Charles, Spacey never lets you forget you're watching him. Not even Darin's struggles with hair loss or a shocking revelation about his family contributes much sympathy for the winking, smirking performance of this movie's star.
The scenes between Darin and Dee suggest that the couple could have made a proto-''Nick and Jessica." Cue the laugh track for this exchange: Bobby says, ''Kissing Troy Donahue is not acting." Sandra retorts, ''Oh yeah? Well you try it!" Incidentally, Bosworth is far too foxy to play the star of ''Gidget" and the ''Tammy" movies, and she and Spacey display a lack of chemistry that can only be called creepy.
Creepier still is the finale, which is a duet between the two Darins, young and old, done up as a Bob Fosse number. Their dance confirms that Spacey, the movie's actual subject, is a decent hoofer, which might be big news for anyone who can bring himself to care.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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