Most of us lead no-screen lives.
Nothing we accomplish in aggregate—our deluded egos aside—deserves a decades-spanning media hosanna of presumed fascination to the worldwide masses at $9 a pop, $6 matinees. Yet this festering fallacy endures: It's more noble to be shameless than fame-less in America. Reality TV is only the newest societal sewer rat to scurry up the Shrine of Tin-Pot Celebrity, peddling the narcissistic lie that we're all worthy of at least small-screen lives.
But to gatekeepers of genuine accomplishment—who'd boot out Paris Hilton on her privileged little tuchas—most of us are as noteworthy as a flea farting.
So who and what define the big-screen life that justifies that odd, compressed, glossed-over, occasionally outright fib of a creature called The Hollywood Biopic? This year's been a mega-bio-copia, spewing out reasonably faithful riffs on, among others: Howard Hughes (The Aviator); Ray Charles (Ray); Cole Porter (De-Lovely); Alfred Kinsey (Kinsey); Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie (Finding Neverland); filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles (Baadasssss); and Alexander the Great (Alexander). And though formatted to fit your smaller screen, a peekaboo of the Pink Panther himself (HBO's The Life and Death of Peter Sellers) got zee booomp of prestige via the casting of Oscar-snatchers Geoffrey Rush and Charlize Theron.
Christ, even Jesus found resurrection at the cineplex, though director Mel Gibson's poli-religio grenade, The Passion of the Christ, was a sado-masochistic assault on the senses masquerading as an appeal to the soul. It was more obsessed with an excruciating death than an enlightening life.
Now, behold the finale of this biodegradable year: the Kevin-Spacey-Loves-Bobby-Darin valentine, Beyond the Sea.
Bobby Darin? Splish-splash-he-was-takin'-a-bath-Bobby Darin? When-that-shark-bites-with-his-teeth-babe-scarlet-billows-start-to-spread Bobby Darin?
A smattering of us rickety 40-plus types recall the cocky but immensely talented bantam who tried to out-Sinatra Sinatra but could never outclass him, before his death in 1973 at age 37, following emergency heart surgery. But to the peach-fuzz crowd that powers the box office, Darin's a shrug and a blank stare, and producer-director-writer-star (and on-set caterer?) Spacey is only marginally more intriguing—a shrug and a bored stare. So does a decades-dead dynamo dwarfed by the demigods of his era deserve this kind of brassy, ballsy, weirdly watchable screen scream?
Put it this way: Does Mack have a knife?
Dramatically, it certainly fulfills the requirements of the live-fast-die-young oeuvre. Darin's life was a beat-the-clock sprint for a sickly Bronx kid, suffering rheumatic fever at 7 and expected to be fitted for a casket by 15. And to the tick-tock of the movie's symbolic wristwatch, for a kid hell-bent to best Sinatra, Darin racks up a stack of hit platters, including, improbably, those in three stylistic genres:"Splish-Splash" in bubble-gummy pop-rock, "Mack the Knife" in deep-dish swing, and "If I Were a Carpenter" (inexplicably AWOL from the movie) in the emerging folk movement of the '60s (as well as "Beyond the Sea," "Dream Lover," "Artificial Flowers" and others). He even shoehorned in marriage to sunny Sandra Dee (played by Kate Bosworth with milky freshness, curdling later in the union), a supporting Oscar nomination (for Capt. Newman, M.D.) and emotional trauma involving his sister, his mother and their secret.
More justification? Kevin Spacey is a big, fat star. Big, fat stars can do what they damn well please.
But there's a more socially resonant reason for this sort of why-him? biography.
In this insta-fame game we play of disposable celebrity and tabloid toxicity—frankly, because of it—it's crucial to maintain standards for cinematic homage if movies are still to be thought of as art, as lasting creative documents with more at stake over time as cultural artifacts than Variety's opening-weekend box-office tallies. Darin may seem the callous choice when giants like Sinatra, Elvis and the Beatles have yet to get their big-time celluloid props, settling for scattershot TV portrayals.
But a big-screen biopic should be as useful for revealing hidden greatness to the uninformed as for affirming obvious accomplishment to the masses; a rationale that redeems Bobby Darin and might rightly have reaped the honor for the largely forgotten entertainer ahead of the Chairman, the King and the Fab Four.
Excepting Sammy Davis Jr. (another show-biz and racial groundbreaker awaiting his big-screen turn, whenever his clown-cool, "peace, babe" image finally recedes from Billy Crystal routines), Darin was widely acknowledged as the most enthralling nightclub showman in America—Sinatra notwithstanding. He wailed on five instruments, danced to a furious blur, whipped off dead-on impersonations and performed to a passion rarely rivaled.
In person.
As with similarly handicapped Broadway shows and the Vegas nightclub exertions of a vanishing breed of Darin-style tuxedo warriors like Wayne Newton and Clint Holmes, lack of a mass TV audience bearing witness doesn't discredit greatness.
Beyond recordings, Darin was nowhere near as exposed as Sinatra, Dino, Sammy and others who rated abundant TV time. This was in yesterday's Three-Network World, remember, not today's 250-Channel Galaxy, where every celebrity belch is filmed for posterity, and the mantra is: The Untelevised Life is Not Worth Living. Sinatra's cachet, though it may wobble over passing years, will never collapse. It's everywhere, all the time. Darin deserves His Moment, which will fade in a flash, but leave behind a cinematic testament.
If that seems excessively generous for a spottily remembered singer, wait 30 years. In a pop-culture likely to swallow up and spit out artists at even more supersonic speeds than today's assembly-line-gone-mad (think Lucy in the chocolate factory), the seemingly indestructible stars now awash in Billboard riches will become history's paupers.
All this is not to claim that Beyond the Sea, for all its surreal-schizoid razzmatazz, is a great film; it's a mostly good, entertaining one, sometimes head-scratchingly strange, and sporatically breathtaking. Darin's frenetic life and Spacey's ardent fandom don't add up to indelible filmmaking. But like its hero, the movie's all reckless bravado and brashness, taking risks without remorse, barreling through common sense, succeeding just often enough to be ingratiating in spite of itself.
Spacey, at 45, has taken hits for playing the younger Darin, and the biopic-within-a-biopic conceit—Darin nearing the end of his life and looking back, movie-style, even interacting with himself as a kid—seems concocted to excuse the age schism. Structurally owing to De-Lovely and All That Jazz, it's a fever dream: fantasy sequences slamming into reality, shouting matches tumbling over a Darin-Dee courtship via elaborate production number. Its style is true to its subject, cinematic manners be damned, and your comfort level depends on your taste for its bizarre cocktail of Yankee Doodle Dandy-ish bio spiked with hallucinogens.
Though the performance eschews subtlety—his Darin is a barking, manic, GET-OUTTA-DA-WAY! obsessive—Spacey is transcendent, so intensely committed to inhabiting a man he idolized for his talents and passions that you can't help but admire the portrayal, even without connecting to it. And what you've heard is true: A nearly possessed Spacey handles all of the singing, and it's eerily, unnervingly Darin-esque, a marvel of precise impersonation welded to impassioned musicality.
Beyond the Sea is an imperfect but intriguing probe of a man worth knowing, especially if something inside you compulsively bops to the phrase, "Look out, ol' Mackie is back."
And maybe, more importantly, if it doesn't.