Not arresting, but not a crime

Given that it’s better than average in most every respect, from the script to the direction to the set dressing, it’s difficult to say exactly why “Stealing Sinatra” (premiering Sunday on Showtime) never catches fire. A semi-comic dramatization of the 1963 kidnapping of Frank Sinatra Jr., it is at once well-made and underwhelming, neither a show to recommend nor one to warn viewers away from. Somehow its sum is less than its parts.

The bouncy lounge jazz and kicky ‘60s lettering of the opening credits seem to say that a zippy period romp is in store -- something like Steven Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can” -- though it doesn’t quite zip and it barely breaks a sweat. Spielberg’s was as thin a movie as this, but it had A-level stars, a director who knows (if nothing else) how to milk a scene for suspense, and the budget to shoot in the right locations, rather than just in Canada. Though good enough for TV, one might say, “Stealing Sinatra” is the victim, in part, of its necessary economies, its B-teamness. It’s a minor work on a minor theme.

David Arquette plays Barry Keenan, a 23-year-old failure in “the business world.” Addled by alcohol and pills (“they may be painkillers” he says, when asked what they are), and looking for a quick way to raise investment capital, he drafts a plan to kidnap and ransom Frank Sinatra’s 19-year-old son. Having convinced himself that this project will be good for everyone -- even for his victims -- Keenan enlists the help of a high school friend (Ryan Browning) and his mother’s ex-boyfriend (William H. Macy). After some false starts, they grab Frank Jr. on a snowy night in Reno and make it through the roadblocks back to a Canoga Park hideout. Things go wrong from there, more or less in the way they actually did.

(There was a competing Sinatra-kidnap film in the pipeline at Columbia Pictures, in which Keenan himself was involved, which Frank Jr. fought in court and has managed to indefinitely delay. This is a different project, which Showtime takes pains to note is based entirely on trial transcripts and contemporary news reports -- there’s even a title card saying that “no animals were harmed and no criminals profited in the making of this film.”)

Ron Underwood, a journeyman director whose credits run from “City Slickers” to “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” to episodes of “Monk,” does a better than workmanlike job. Screenwriter Howard Korder, an Obie Award-winning playwright who also penned the recent Chris Noth TV movie “Bad Apple,” gives the actors actual scenes to play -- exchanges that sound a little more like conversation and have a little more dramatic swing and motion than docudramas often muster.

He’s written characters, in other words, and whether or not they accurately reflect the people they’re based on, they are well-acted -- though Arquette does at times seem to be playing Keenan as a tribute to Rupert Pupkin. A man whose self-obsession is so blindingly complete as to resemble a kind of innocence, Arquette’s Keenan is stiff and stilted and almost pathologically formal -- using old-fashioned phrases like “a charming girl” or “a tad ridiculous” -- like a child playing at adult competence.

Macy’s Irwin is serious and sad; he speaks with the authority of failure, which he confuses with wisdom. Paternal and pedantic, he calls the whole plot “wrong, just plain wrong,” even as he goes along with it, and allows himself to be led. Like Arquette’s, his character is self-dramatizing, which allows Browning -- as the reluctant third conspirator -- to steal the film, simply by being recognizably real.

Also notable are Thomas Ian Nicholas (Kevin in the “American Pie” movies), scared but not unresourceful as Frank Sinatra Jr. (and he sings, too); Gillian Barber as Keenan’s depressed mother; Sam McMurray (Dr. Schweiber on “Freaks and Geeks”) as an FBI agent; and James Russo as a convincing Sinatra Sr., angry, profane -- he could join the cast of “Deadwood” with that mouth -- and finally fatherly.

Less convincing are the Canadian locations: Vancouver is a lovely place, but it is lovely in a British Columbian way, and though the filmmakers have managed to find buildings that might well have existed in the Southern California of 40 years ago, and have filled the streets with cool old cars and random palm trees, the light and the sky and the landscape are all wrong, and the streets are too often wet, the estimable tradition of rain in the L.A. noir fiction notwithstanding.

*

‘Stealing Sinatra’

Where: Showtime

When: 8-9:40 p.m. Sunday

Rating: The network has rated the movie TV-14VL (may not be suitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for graphic violence and coarse language).

David Arquette...Barry Keenan

William H. Macy...John Irwin

James Russo...Frank Sinatra

Thomas Ian Nicholas...Frank Sinatra Jr.

Ryan Browning...Joe Amsler

Executive producer, Ron Ziskin. Director, Ron Underwood. Writer, Howard Korder.