‘James Dean’ to air James Franco to portray icon Sunday on TNT

The hair. The hurt. The pout. The smirk.

Only James Franco, a wily 22-year-old actor best known for his turn in the 1999 NBC drama “Freaks and Geeks,” could have slipped so convincingly into James Dean’s rumpled sweater and khaki trousers.

Veteran screenwriter Israel Horovitz has hailed his cable TV movie, “James Dean,” premiering at 8 p.m. Sunday on TNT, as the fourth James Dean movie. That’s going too far, but it’s definitely worth a look, if only to savor Franco’s savvy portrayal of the movie icon who crashed his Porsche Spyder sports car on a California highway in 1955, frozen in death as the troubled Hollywood rebel. He was 24.

Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Stephen Dorff were among the hordes who read for the coveted role, but the relatively unknown Franco seemed a more logical choice, free of the baggage of titanic Hollywood hits.

Franco does his best with Mark Rydell’s uneven direction and a script by Horovitz that too often leaves the viewer asking, “Well, what happened next?” and dwells too heavily on Dean’s frantic attempts to win his father’s love. His lonely, brooding temperament most likely had many roots, and didn’t spring solely from paternal rejection.

“My mother made me promise to be an artist,” says Franco in a voiceover in the movie’s opening scene. “She taught me that imagination could take a person anywhere. Mine took me from Indiana to Broadway to Hollywood. She was right.”

Franco’s voiceovers come and go like summer rain showers, but when they’re used, they reflect Dean’s drive to become a respected actor. But the swagger is there from the start, on the set of Elia Kazan’s movie classic, “East of Eden,” in which Dean blurts out to the classically trained actor, Raymond Massey (portrayed by Edward Herrmann), “This man can’t play my father, he’s too old. Get somebody else.” Of course, Massey stays and Dean is berated.

The story then flashes back to Santa Monica in 1939, where a 9-year-old Dean boards a train bearing his mother’s coffin. He is bound for Indiana, to be raised on a farm by his aunt and uncle.

Constant reminders of his father Winton’s (actor Michael Moriarty) abandonment soon wear thin. After getting stage and television work in New York, he returns to Hollywood to portray the troubled Cal in “Eden.” As he’s riding in Kazan’s (Enrico Colantoni) limousine, Dean asks to swing into his father’s driveway, only to be rejected once again.

Will Dean ever stop turning up on his doorstep? One of the movie’s strongest moments, however, borrows from the observatory scene in “Rebel Without a Cause,” when Winton and Jimmy meet in the Hollywood Hills and father finally tells son that he loves him, that he is proud of his career – and that another man probably fathered him. Franco’s pained expression suggests he’s not only lost a father, but a mother’s reputation as well.

Too often the movie starts a scene but jarringly, shifts to another. Movie, TV and stage auditions show Dean’s budding genius, so why not reveal what happened when he tries out for the legendary Actor’s Studio in New York? We’re told Kazan, Lee Strasburg and Cheryl Crawford would hear him read, but the scene is never shown.

To its credit, the movie shows Dean’s petulant side, such as his clashes with director George Stevens on the set of “Giant,” his final movie, and with many others in his life who meant him no harm. But, also in its favor, the film never shows the actor as mean-spirited, just temperamental and restless; a fragile flower ill prepared to deal with martinets like Warner (smartly portrayed by director Rydell), who at one point upbraids Dean for giving a magazine interview in which he hints at his bisexuality. Warner also demands that Dean stop sleeping with starlet Pier Angeli (Valentina Cervi), whose disapproving mother accuses the actor of child molestation.

Did all this really happen? One can only wonder, especially after reading the biopic’s disclaimer, “Most of this film was based on fact; some was an educated guess.”

So suspend your disbelief, and enjoy the ride. Like the icon himself, “James Dean” never promises that everything it tells is the gospel truth.