"Behind the Candelabra (HBO, Sunday), "Ring of Fire" (Lifetime, Monday). I feel about biopics a little the way Joan Crawford did about wire hangers, but people will make them, and they do have their pleasures. "Behind the Candelabra" is Steven Soderbergh's lavish, star-studded Liberace study, through the eyes of companion Scott Thorson, on whose 1988 memoir it's based. Richard LaGravenese's screenplay, which does not attempt to place Liberace's music in any sort of cultural context, is unusually smart and unhurried for this sort of picture. With Michael Douglas and Matt Damon as excellent leads, much of it plays like a kind of a slightly drugged screwball comedy, though things turn serious, though not judgmental, at the end. (It is a kindly film, overall.) The supporting cast includes a mustachioed Scott Bakula, bespectacled Dan Aykroyd and long-haired Rob Lowe, hilarious as a cosmetic surgeon who has taken too much of his own medicine. The less expensive "Ring of Fire," directed by Allison Anders, takes the rocky yet durable romance of June Carter and Johnny Cash, previously re-created in "Walk the Line," from Carter's point of view — and it does have the woman-triumphant spine of a Lifetime movie. Jewel, the Alaskan songbird, plays Carter, whom she resembles from certain angles, and acquits herself admirably. She can sing too. As Cash, Matt Ross doesn't get in hailing distance of Johnny's great American bass-baritone, but he has the moves and enough of the inimitable (and yet much-imitated) vibe. Leaping through the years, the narrative doesn't quite gel, but discrete scenes play well and the musical numbers feel right. X's John Doe plays June's uncle A.P. Carter, Francis Conroy is her mother, Maybelle.