‘Sonny and Cher Story’ Hits Familiar Notes

We’ve got them, babe. Them, in tonight’s ABC movie “And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story,” being actors Jay Underwood and Renee Faia. He’s a little too tall to be Sonny, she’s a little too short to be Cher, but otherwise they get by--her vocal and facial expressions are spot-on, right down to the eyelid dips and Mona Lisa smile. And the Cher singing, done by Kelly Van Hoose Smith, is also fine mimicry, although Sonny’s singing by Jess Harnell is both too whiny and too on-key.

The problem is that the characterizations come completely from the public Sonny and Cher, the couple we saw for so many years on TV, rather than really giving any sense of the private Sonny Bono and Cherilyn Sarkisian LaPierre. We’re to believe their relationship dynamics were fully formed, right off the bat, at their first meeting when she was a precocious 16-year-old and he an eager music-biz nebbish.

When he, having watched her dance, tells her that she’s a good dancer, she shoots back, “You’re short. What does that give us?” To which he replies, “One short guy and one smart mouth.”

It’s snappier patter than we get later in rather flat re-creations of their celebrated TV variety show. And it leaves nowhere to go, no sense of them growing or evolving. It also, as such, soft-sells Bono’s role in enhancing that dynamic as their act, only to see it grow out of control and take over their real life. Bono comes off as pleasantly naive, rather than shrewd as is portrayed in most accounts of the pair’s careers.

Of course, this film comes not from most accounts, but from Bono’s own book, with his widow, Mary Bono, as executive producer. But even within that, writer Ellen Watson plays fast and loose with the timeline and fills the script with just too many magic moments. It reminds that the actual story of the real people had much more drama than a TV dramatization can capture. To really get them, babe, hold out for a “VH1 Behind the Music.”

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* “And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story” airs tonight at 9 p.m. ABC. It has been rated TV-PGDL (with advisories for suggestive dialogue and coarse language).