REVIEWED - BEYOND THE SEA: In Ray, which opens here in January, Jamie Foxx so credibly inhabits the role of Ray Charles that it's very easy to forget one is watching an actor at work. The exact opposite is the case with another musical biopic, Beyond the Sea, which is so awkwardly devised that it consistently draws attention to its artifice, writes Michael Dwyer.

Performing with an unabashed eagerness to please that rivals Michael Flatley, Kevin Spacey doubles as leading actor and director for this wildly misconceived picture of actor-singer Bobby Darin, who died in 1973 at the age of 37 - eight years younger than Spacey is now. That significant age gap is confronted early on in the movie when, in a weird fictitious device whereby Darin is playing himself in a movie of his own life, a reporter asks if he is too old for the role.

The movie's most arch misstep is to fabricate conversations between the older Darin and the precocious boy who plays him as an ailing child in the film-within-the-film. When the boy questions an elaborately staged, all-dancing fantasy sequence, the older Darin assures him, "Listen, kid, movies are like moonbeams. We do with them with we will."

What Spacey does with this movie is as much a disservice to the screen musical as Lars Von Trier's similarly stylised and hollow Dancer in the Dark, and to Darin, who is sketchily drawn and largely underestimated in terms of his own evident talent, so much so that one wonders what attracted Spacey to the project in the first place.

The answer is that Spacey clearly can impersonate Darin's singing voice convincingly, as he does time and again in the well-staged performance sequences that provide welcome relief from the banality of the vapid screenplay, its recourse to lazy, clichéd shorthand (for example, his voiceover observation that the 1960s "went by like a locomotive"), and the thickly sliced ham of an oddly chosen supporting cast who are mostly embarrassing to watch.

Kate Bosworth is miscast as Sandre Dee, Darin's actress wife who was one of the biggest box-office stars in the US in the early 1960s, a fact glossed over in a movie that chooses to portray her exclusively as vacuous, untalented and an alcoholic. Such is the strangely selective nature of this film that what it omits is often far more interesting than what it chooses to include and emphasise.