Kevin Spacey’s biography of Bobby Darin, “Beyond the Sea,” is an act of extraordinary chutzpah. He not only directed the film, co-produced it and rewrote the script. He dares to play Darin.
Spacey is 45. Darin died in 1973, when he was 37. For long stretches of the film, you have to take Spacey’s word for it that he is Darin. The strain shows especially when he’s playing Darin in his 20s, courting Sandra Dee on the set of their first movie together, “Come September.” The temptation is to ask: Who is this aging impostor?
At other times, Spacey’s genius for impersonation shines through. From certain angles, particularly when he’s on-stage, Spacey does indeed look like Darin. And he sounds very much like him. Spacey used his own voice to sing “Beyond the Sea” and “Dream Lover,” and he creates an uncanny mixture, a Spacey/Darin who sounds much like both men.
Spacey all but recruits the audience to suspend disbelief, especially in the opening scenes, when he makes an irresistible joke out of childhood memories of Bronx neighbors literally dancing in the streets. Of course it’s not real, he suggests, but isn’t it fun to remember it this way?
Although it omits Darin’s second wife and other inconvenient facts, the script does a reasonable job of hitting the turning points of Darin’s career: his lucky break pushing a song he barely knows on network television, the instant success of “Mack the Knife” and “Splish Splash,” his nightclub triumphs, the movie career that led him to marry Dee, his 1964 Oscar nomination for playing a dramatic role in “Captain Newman M.D.,” his estrangement from Dee, and his attempts to change direction and become a folksinger.
“When the delivery man knows me, then I’ll be a star,” he insists. His competitive obsession with fame reaches a peak when Life magazine does a profile of him at the same time Cosmopolitan does Dee.
One of the movie’s hysterical high points is Academy Awards night, when Darin loses the Oscar to Melvyn Douglas in “Hud.” He sarcastically bellows Douglas’ most famous line from the winning movie, and complains that he’s there “with Gidget and Tammy” (Dee’s most famous teen roles). If you’ve ever imagined how sore losers handle Oscar night, or wondered just how badly they might deal with defeat, “Beyond the Sea” is a must.
Kate Bosworth does a fair imitation of Dee, and Greta Scacchi is even better as her controlling mother, who throws hissy fits about Darin and tries to push her daughter in the direction of another “Come September” star, Rock Hudson. The excellent supporting cast includes Bob Hoskins, John Goodman, Brenda Blethyn and, in what turns out to be a crucial role, Caroline Aaron.
“Beyond the Sea” isn’t quite like any other Hollywood biopic. It’s a labor of love that could only have been created by Spacey, whose commitment to his idol is rather scarily total.