Directed by Kevin Spacey. Starring Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, and Bob Hoskins. Rated PG.

Beyond the Sea is fascinating on several levels--much like, say, a train wreck shot from a hundred angles. Most of its big revelations happen well outside the story of Bobby Darin, and by insisting on playing someone who died almost a decade younger than the filmmaker is today, Kevin Spacey also allows us to see one man's career unravelling while portraying another at the start of his.

The real saga of Darin, born Walden Robert Cassotto in 1936, is compelling, in a downbeat way. After a bout of fever that permanently weakened his heart, the future star threw himself into music with a passion that belied the approbation of his doctors and went beyond even the ambitions of his aggressive stage mother, the morphine-addicted Polly. After marrying America's surfin' sweetheart Sandra Dee, he became a kind of transition figure between swinging Frank Sinatra and the more reflective rockers of the 1960s, losing his way as the Vietnam War raged on, and quietly dying after a Vegas comeback in the early '70s.

But forget all that; this is about Spacey! Not content to elaborately restage Darin's showbiz high points--his "Splish Splash" on American bandstand, his big debut at the Copa, a very public romancing of Dee on the Italian set of Come September --he saddles the tale with a Citizen Kane --as-a-musical structure that stops things dead whenever they threaten to get interesting. Recurring business with his younger self, played by William Ullrich ("Get me a Haley Joel Osment") makes the movie more like Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education than it has a right to be.

The director (who also cowrote the screenplay) duly notes that Darin was surrounded by potent women, alternately supplicative and smothering, but he has undermined their ethnic milieu by hanging a "No Americans need apply" sign over the casting (or is it Freudian?) couch. Britain's Brenda Blethyn plays Polly with an indeterminate accent, breaking into breathy, lip-synced song at the drop of a Steinway. Aussie Kate Bosworth does Sandra Dee as a Wasp fawn caught in Darin's headlights, while Italo-Australian Greta Scacchi is Dee's harridan mother. (Her best line, somehow delivered without irony: "You should have concentrated more on Rock Hudson!")

Elsewhere, Virginian Caroline Aaron does a Nia Vardalos impression as loudmouthed sister Nina, while Englishman Bob Hoskins's part, as the unfortunately named brother-in-law Charlie Maffia, is padded so our tour guide can have a daddy-figure sounding board.

Speaking of padding, the real Nina was an obese ignoramus who represented everything Darin--an avid reader and self-made intellectual--was desperate to get away from. Skinny, reticent, and balding Steve Blauner comanaged the singer with his wife, and earlier with another woman, but here the three have been easily subsumed into the capacious form of booming John Goodman. Also, Polly is dispatched years earlier than she actually died. And how did Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun suddenly get so much hair? He was a chrome dome in Ray , only a few months ago.

Start anywhere and you'll see what else was left out. Conveying the insipidness of pre-Beatles pop music would have been amusing. Acknowledging the singer's serious turn as a neo-Nazi in Stanley Kramer's Pressure Point would have added depth. Instead, we get blandly perfunctory treatments of late-'60s culture shock; Darin's intense friendship with Robert Kennedy is tossed away. And even the tale's big melodramatic payoff--Darin learning about his true origins--is handled so flatly that it hardly matters.

Changing the facts for a biopic is as natural as giving Jesus blue eyes. But by turning Bobby Darin's sad story into a referendum on his own résumé, Kevin Spacey has effectively written his own singing-and-dancing epitaph: Kevin, Ye Hardly Knew Me .