Polish-born filmmaker Roman Polanski‘s life itself reads like a movie, full of its own dramatically cinematic highs
and lows, which is perhaps why multi-hyphenate Damian Chapa decided to dive headlong into this biopic, being peddled largely on its “unauthorized” pedigree. Other words might better describe the film, however — chief among them the phrase “fantastically terrible.”

Working from a script co-written with Carlton Holder, Chapa fashions a movie that opens like a 100-yard dash, cramming virtually all the big set piece scenes of Polanski’s early life — a childhood in which he survives horrors of the Holocaust survivor, a creative upswing of the late 1960s, the shocking Manson murders that leave him a sudden widower, and the famous 1977 statutory rape case which ends with him becoming a fugitive
felon — into its opening five minutes. The rest of the movie then indiscriminately jumps around. We see Polanski (Chapa) woo Sharon Tate (Brienne DeBeau) prior to production on The Fearless Vampire Killers, and take on a menacing “special consultant” for Rosemary’s Baby. There’s partying, and shop talk with producer pal Gene Gutowski (Paul Sanders). Flashbacks to young Roman (Kevin de Ridder) are rendered in black-and-white.

There are also a couple weird sidebar digressions throughout (a scene with Frank Sinatra telling a minion, “Let’s send her her walking papers,” and Mia Farrow then receiving divorce notification on the set of her cinematic collaboration with Polanski), but Polanski doesn’t fully capture its subject’s Napoleonic arrogance, and it’s additionally far too riddled with jaw-dropping inaccuracies (the specifics of his rape arrest) and wild flights-of-fancy (a Nazi-themed flashback just before Polanski commits his infamous sexual assault) to be taken seriously as having any sort of psychological insightfulness. Most egregious of these spurious, denigrating strands might be a brief, tasteless scene which posits that Polanski was paid by tabloid photographers to pose next to evidence at the scene of the Tate murder — namely, the word “pig” scrawled on the wall in his fiancée’s blood.

Visually, the film is framed in coffin-tight fashion, in an effort to mask its meager production means. This grates, certainly, but its mortal sins are mostly related to story, and acting; almost all the dialogue is wincingly on-the-nose, and while Chapa, who once played Lyle Menendez in a TV movie about the parent-slaying brothers, at least slow-peddles Polanski’s legendary impish charm, he doesn’t have the range to convey the hole-in-his-heart sociopathy that informs the dark lens through which Polanski views the world, and thus operates in manipulative fashion. There are also repeated, confounding lapses in logic based on what we see unfold on screen. Late in the movie, producer Gutowski says that he “waited for the real Roman to surface” all through Polanski’s courtship with Tate — this despite the fact that we’ve seen the two of them have a conversation about Tate… over the naked body of another Polanski conquest!

The one story thread that holds any dark sway involves a Satanic consultant (Thomas Deuilhet) hired for the sake of authenticity on Rosemary’s Baby, but eventually Polanski even fritters away this spooky allegorical menace, positing that the character is quite literally the devil, and sets Manson acolyte Susan Atkins on the path that leads to the murder of Tate after meeting her at a bar. What? Yes, seriously. A jumbled, whorish, opportunistic hot mess, Polanski definitively proves that “bold” and “good” are not always synonymous. For more information on the film, click here. (Amadeus Pictures, R, 89 minutes)