Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (18)

Clooney's debut as a director is an unusual, muted farce

The name Chuck Barris is unfamiliar to British audiences ­ one journalist hilariously confused him in print with Chuck Norris, adding the latter's filmography of martial-arts clunkers to Barris's already surreal CV.

The story of how a goofy Jewish kid whose mother dressed him as a girl came to conceive such demented televisual shows in the 1960s and 1970s as The Dating Game (the prototype for Blind Date) and The Gong Show (which cheerfully encouraged the shrill ineptitude of its contestants' party pieces) would have made a scintillating movie in itself. But Barris's long-held claim in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his unauthorised autobiography, that he was moonlighting as a ruthless CIA assassin during his tenure as American TV's golden boy provides an embarrassment of riches for potential film makers.

It's something of an eccentric choice of project for George Clooney's first feature as a director ­ but short of not turning up on set, it would be difficult for him to botch the livewire screenplay by Oscar-nominated screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The screenwriter's scripts for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation ­ both nominated for Oscars ­ also explored the intercourse between inspiration and insanity in the minds of extraordinary men.

Clooney's visual style tends toward the over-emphatic ­ colours are either sun-frazzled or deep-frozen ­ and he is lucky not to be struck off, or whatever it is that happens to irresponsible directors, for allowing the camera frantically to circle a character to denote disorientation. But those small quibbles aside, he has something unusual on his hands ­ an oddball biopic, a muted farce and a tender inventory of a man's mental disintegration.

As Barris's fame increases, and the bodily hits mount up alongside the ratings ones, Sam Rockwell, in the lead role, reveals new shades of quiet panic and vulnerability as he is engulfed by his own fears of inadequacy. No wonder Rockwell was Best Actor at the Berlin Film Festival last weekend. He is flanked by Drew Barrymore as Barris's girlfriend, and Julia Roberts as a femme fatale (she gets the film's most delicious line: "Leave the microfilm in," she says as Barris goes to remove it from his rectum before lovemaking).

Clooney plays the CIA boss who recruits Barris, oblivious to his protests. "I'm not killing people," bleats Barris. "My future is in television."

The question of how much is true becomes irrelevant. To Barris, this is all evidently gospel.