While \Beyond the Sea,"" a biopic about singer Bobby Darin, directed, starring, co-written and co-produced by Kevin Spacey, may not be a great movie, or really even worth seeing unless you are a fan of Spacey or Darin, it certainly is a movie.
And that's the one thing that this somewhat enjoyable mess never lets you forget: It's got elaborate dance sequences, it has childhood flashbacks, it has self-reflexive commentary on the problems of telling the story of the life of Bobby Darin, and it has Darin's poor mother from the Bronx looking glamorous enough that whenever she's onscreen you half expect her to announce that she's going to be on the cover of next month's Vanity Fair.
The one thing that you'll be sure to walk out of the theater with is the assured knowledge that you just watched a movie, complete with attractive stars, a ""success against all odds"" story and over-the-top, sometimes painfully obvious metaphors.
But it's not the touch of Hollywood that prevents this fair film from being great in fact, the dance sequences breathe life into this otherwise emotionally unsatisfying film. It's always good fun to see a dance sequence break out for no apparent reason and Spacey nails his Astaire-like dance moves, which is perhaps the most convincing argument for seeing this movie. So when Hollywood rears its superficial head and the dancing begins, all is right with the world this film creates. It's when the movie gets down to the job of having a plot that you want to foxtrot out of the theater.
What mars the movie is information overkill: Darin was a versatile artist with a full life, and this film becomes so obsessed with the need to give convincing snapshots of each stage of his life that inevitably you leave the theater without a solid impression of any sort. The film details how as a child, doctors told him that it would be a medical miracle if he reached fifteen, then details how music became his dream for the future, how his novelty rock 'n' roll hit ""Splish Splash"" made him a star, how he defied the industry's attempt to pigeon-hole him in that genre and moved on to become a celebrated interpreter of pop standards, then how he wooed and married movie star Sandra Dee, (Kate Bosworth), how he and Dee had marriage problems, and then how he became reborn as an establishment-trashing hippie -all with dance sequences and songs sprinkled throughout.
If that last paragraph was exhausting, without many comfortable transitions and left you wondering when the end was in sight, then you've got an idea of what watching this movie can be like. It covers so many incarnations of Bobby Darin-the man, the artist -that it ends up leaving you well informed but emotionally detached, and that's the one thing this movie can't afford to do. Spacey portrays Darin the crooner and Darin the hippie with a painstaking attention to detail, but you don't know why he stopped singing ""Mack the Knife"" and picked up a guitar to protest the war.
