From where I sit, Kevin Spacey’s Beyond the Sea looks like a crystallization of all that went right – what little there was of it – with the moviemaking business in 2004. Just now branching into general release from a limited-range Oscars-qualifying run, the film pays tribute to the long-gone pop singer Bobby Darin in ways deeper by far than the bland hagiography that characterizes most show-world biopics. By comparison, Taylor Hackford’s big-deal production of Ray – concerning Ray Charles, whose music happened to exert a keen influence upon Darin – is desultory hackwork, Jamie Foxx’s splendid impersonation of Bro. Ray notwithstanding.
At 45, Spacey is patently too long in the tooth and a bit thin in the tonsorial department to be portraying Bobby Darin at any age, much less the singer’s early stage of teen-idol stardom. But then, so was Darin too old – he died at 37 in 1973 – to have replayed his fascinating and mottled career, had he wanted to do so. Aged prematurely by a heart condition dating from childhood, Darin spent his life wondering when his number would be up, defying the Reaper by defining himself as an artist in perpetual and aggressive evolution.
Precisely Spacey’s point. He launches Beyond the Sea amidst a scene of backstage hustle-and-bustle, portraying an early-middle-aged Darin en route to a performance. A band is vamping into an ominous ballad from pre-WWII Germany that Darin has transformed into a finger-snapping signature-song: "Mack the Knife." The audience is digging every note, but not so Darin – who finds himself distracted by the ghostly apparition of a child, peering in from off-stage. Darin stops the music, and the cameras draw back to reveal the nightclub as a sound-stage setting, where Darin is attempting to make a movie about his haunted life.
The intrusive kid proves just as abruptly to be an actor assigned to portray Darin as a child (William Ullrich). There seems to be plenty wrong with this movie-within-the-movie, starting with the self-evident truth that Darin is too old to be playing Darin. So he asks the boy how better to get a handle on the story. Begin at the beginning, the youngster insists – or words to that effect. Cue flashback.
And hence Spacey’s ability to handle the crucial role, here, without so much as a CGI face-lift or a digital comb-over. Directing himself with all due self-indulgence – his extravagantly generous performance, including an eerily accurate approximation of Darin’s Bronx baritone, justifies the conceit – Jersey kid Spacey has crafted an appealing hybrid of art-film experimentalism and conventional show-biz biography.
Such dreamlike flashbacks are nothing new (see Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All That Jazz, from 1979, and this past year’s dreary Cole Porter bio, De-Lovely). But Spacey’s embrace of dream-logic and Brooklynite screenwriter Lewis Colick’s time-warping, largely non-linear, script bring to the approach a radical freshening, complete with apropos-of-nothing-and-everything song-and-dance sequences. The telling, though sentimentally affectionate, never turns treacly – assuming, instead, Darin’s own attitude of defiance toward a death he had been anticipating since his schoolboy days.
Spacey is a marvel. His spot-on channeling of Darin will not only command respect for the immediate film. The effort also will redouble the popular appreciation of Darin in all phases of a piebald career that ranged from rock ’n’ roll to cabaret jazz to C&W to Dylan-come-lately folkie-rock – to high promise, largely unfulfilled, as a Hollywood actor. (The end of his life found Darin recasting himself on record as a Motown soul-singer and on network television as a tragic villain opposite lawman Glenn Ford, on an episode of Cade’s County.)
Spacey also surrounds himself with fine supporting talents, including an uncharacteristically restrained John Goodman as Darin’s loyal and befuddled manager, Bob Hoskins as a devoted in-law harboring some grim family secret, and – in the plum role of Darin’s wife, Sandra Dee – Kate Bosworth. Bosworth could have reinterpreted the Tammy and Gidget star in terms of beauty alone, but she nails the deeper currents of torment that made Dee one of mid-century Hollywood’s more conflicted personalities. Greta Scacchi plays Dee’s mother with a controlling intensity.
The romantic chemistry and professional rivalry between Spacey’s Darin and Bosworth’s Dee are such that no conventional lovemaking interlude would suffice. The characters’ affection for one another shows to best advantage in a loud domestic brawl that ends in a tender clinch amidst the wreckage. Spacey covers Darin’s political-awareness phase of the waning 1960s – he cultivated a mustache, altered his billing to "Bob Darin," and campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy – in strokes that emphasize the naïve sincerity of an artist better equipped to be a next-generation Sinatra than a war-protesting folkie.
Spacey’s assured performance aside, the greater brilliance of Beyond the Sea lies in its deployment of an honest-to-gosh big band, tearing through some fine arrangements. Anyone who either remembers or just wonders how such music sounded during its heyday will find a wealth of concentrated brilliance here. (PG-13)