Song-and-Dunce Act

The

problem with many hollywood biopics is that they assume the audience cares about celebrities as people. They wallow in sad childhoods, sadder marriages — blah, blah, boring, boring — forgetting that we love stars for their artfully fabricated personas. We like our celebrities to be celebrities, thank you very much. If they wanted to be real people, they should have gone into retail.

So it's a relief that cbs's Martin and Lewis (Nov. 24, 9 p.m. E.T.) is mainly about the show-biz duo — singer Dean Martin and hey-lady-comic Jerry Lewis — as a show-biz duo. It starts where their public lives do, in a crisply directed sequence with the two preparing to go onstage: the camera zeroes in on their hands, as Martin coolly downs a Scotch and Lewis fusses with his props. From their first meeting in 1945 through their heyday in the 1950s, Martin and Lewis shows how they fused opposite stereotypes — the smoky Italian lover and the nervous, nasal Jewish kid — into a sex-and-yuks act more successful than either had been separately. In fact, the pairing of needy Jerry and detached Dean wasn't quite amore, but it was good business.

At first Martin is a savior to Lewis, a teenager whose slapstick act is bombing in strip clubs. But the public comes to see Lewis as the real star, a source of tension that finally breaks them up. Whether you consider Lewis a genius or one more reason to hate the French, the movie makes his originality unignorable. Lewis' now dated antics were once too hip for the room: audiences used to simple jokes didn't consider eating saltines while lip-synching an aria from The Barber of Seville to be comedy. You can see the germ of physical shock comics like Tom Green and Johnny Knoxville in Lewis, as embodied by Sean Hayes (Will and Grace's Jack), who is all rubber legs and flailing arms. Jeremy Northam (Gosford Park) is believable as Martin, but he can't compete with Hayes' human Warner Bros. cartoon.

The story does stray into that home-childhood-boring-boring territory. Lewis, we learn, craves attention because Daddy ignored him; Martin, so detached he can't connect with anyone, cats around on his wife. The movie doesn't trust us to intuit its insights into its subjects, so we have to hear flat-out from Martin, "My mother always told me, 'Never let anybody know who you are.'" At one point, Hayes is forced to say, "When Jerry Lewis loves, he loves too much, and when Jerry Lewis hates, he hates too much." When this script explains, it explains too much. But mostly, refreshingly, it lets Martin and Lewis' work tell the story, ending as it began, with the duo onstage, where the stars are as real as most of us care to see them.