Does everything for which writer/bad director Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network) lives fit well enough into a behind-the-scenes look at the cast of I Love Lucy? Give the man almost any American institution—the White House, cable news, Facebook—and he’ll find a way to bring it down to a reality check, reminding us along the way that the world is run by assholes. Who woulda known?

Lucille Ball (a dedicated but odd-looking performance from Nicole Kidman, who’s got some weird wide-eyed thing going on) and her husband Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) are the brilliant minds behind America’s most-watched sitcom. Things aren’t so idyllic under the surface, though. Wanna know why? Because they are assholes, says Sorkin. Of course. Ball is accused of communist sympathies while Arnaz’s affairs are tabloid fodder. Everyone is sad and pissed off all the time.

Being the Ricardos never falters in its performances, despite its myriad stumbles in everything else it tries. Just how does a film about one of the most beloved comic duos in media history wind up so humorless? Kidman and Bardem spew out all the factoids Sorkin got out of whatever biography he read, but they are still just masses of meat in a frame, like an AI bot telling you about its internet searches.

Everyone around Ball and Arnaz are bumbling morons, typical of Sorkin’s usual “great people” mindset. Ball builds her storyboards as if she’s diagnosing computer code or defusing a bomb; intense music flares—intense close-ups everywhere. Why on Earth should a movie about a 23-minute sitcom be so methodical and why did Sorkin employ a painfully pointless fake documentary framing device? It hurts to watch, and whereas Sorkin’s last project, The Trial of the Chicago 7, went for something, anything—even if it was merely highlighting Sorkin’s skepticism of progressivism—and had a unity of vision, here that vision feels as aimless as a lumberjack swinging an axe in a field with nary a tree in sight.

4

+Actors do their jobs

-Tonal chaos, bad direction

Being the Ricardos

Directed by Sorkin

With Kidman and Bardem

Prime, R, 132 min