Spacey’s Darin maneuver

The restaurant on Melrose Avenue was empty when Steve Blauner walked in, and the aging showbiz manager correctly surmised that his lunch date had rented the place out for efficiency, or maybe for effect. A waiter pointed Blauner to a rear room and its lone occupant, who rose from his table and extended his hand. It was the actor Kevin Spacey, bathed in a warm aura cast by the window at his back.

“That was so the light would be in my eyes,” Blauner recalled, using the blunt language that meshes his Bronx youth and Hollywood education. “And they say backlight makes you look younger.”

That meeting more than a year ago was to discuss a film about the music and life of Bobby Darin, a figure of deep passion for both men. Despite the privacy afforded by the empty restaurant, it was hard to imagine that anyone else in Hollywood would have been leaning in to eavesdrop. A Darin biopic was a pitch that had languished for more than a decade, and Darin himself was a pop-culture figure who stirred the passions of dedicated music fans but, to the mainstream mind, was either forgotten or anchored more to “Splish Splash” than “Beyond the Sea.”

Still, Blauner arrived as a protector of the flame -- he was Darin’s friend in youth and devoted business manager to the end. Spacey, meanwhile, came to the table as the Hollywood star who, after more than a decade, was within reach of turning his lifelong reverence for Darin into a career moment. He wanted to co-write the screenplay, he wanted to direct the film, he wanted to star, he wanted to sing ... he wanted to be Darin.

Blauner cut to the chase and, give or take a few choice adjectives, said something like this: “You’re too old, you shouldn’t sing and you’re out of your mind to direct.”

The lunch that followed was either four hours or six hours, depending on which man you ask, but both agree how it ended. Blauner gave his blessing that Spacey, 45, would portray Darin on screen -- in his early 20s and 30s -- and that Spacey would sing every song in the movie. What’s more, Spacey would also direct and co-write the film along with Lewis Colick.

“His passion for the project was unreal,” Blauner said. “It was like a Mafia sit-down. There was no way to say no to him. It was like that with Bobby too. There was no sense arguing.”

The result of that meeting and many other surrendered arguments is “Beyond the Sea,” which opens Friday in Los Angeles and New York. It is one of the more intriguing films of the season because it revolves around an obsessive star who, through sheer force of will, overcame showbiz conventions to let his voice sing out even as he fought against the tick-tick-ticking of life’s merciless deadlines.

Whether that particular man is Kevin Spacey or Bobby Darin depends on how you read the script.

In one childhood scene in “Beyond the Sea,” a wide-eyed Darin stares at a poster of Frank Sinatra framed outside the entrance of the Copacabana club in New York as the child’s mother clutches his hand, telling the boy that someday he will trump Sinatra in fame and voice.

The movie delights in the improbability of all that once Walden Robert Cassotto (Darin’s real name) reaches his 20s with a receding hairline and a grave heart condition. But the tenacious Darin, gifted with sublime timing and verve as a singer, rose to fame with the bobby-soxer hit “Splish Splash” in 1958 and, a year later, the pouting teen torch song “Dream Lover.”

Defying all counsel, he then recast himself into something resembling that Sinatra poster with the unlikely smash “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” Just over half a decade later, Darin made another startling detour and became a bluejeaned folk singer, and still had hits, such as “If I Were a Carpenter.” The singer died of heart failure in 1973, at age 37.

Just as Darin’s mother made a Sinatra show bill a compass point from a New York sidewalk, Spacey’s mother made Darin an icon within the walls of the actor’s childhood home in Woodland Hills. “My mother was in love with Bobby Darin,” Spacey said, “and I sang all his songs into a hairbrush when I was just a kid. I was just 12 or 13 when he died.”

But a hairbrush and a Hollywood film are not the same.

Spacey sings every song in the film -- a gaudy gamble on his part. A Darin biopic had long been deemed impotent as a film prospect because the American public knew little about Darin’s face -- or life. They did know the voice that sang “Mack the Knife” and “Dream Lover.” That voice, though, is never heard in “Beyond the Sea.”

“I knew Bobby Darin, suh, and you are no Bobby Darin!” Spacey said as he roamed the floors of the Capitol Records tower one afternoon last month. It’s a line Spacey has been using a lot lately to poke the eyes of the critics and Darin purists who have taken shots at his ambitious venture.

The Capitol tower is called the House That Frank Built in deference to Sinatra’s years of platinum and gold, but outside one of its storied studios there is a large photograph of Darin in which his expression suggests a stern artist at work. Spacey, well armored by his years on stage and sound stage, said the gaze of his old idol made him gulp. “I saw that, and it was like he was saying, ‘All right, you think you can do this? You better be good.’ ”

Dealing with obstacles

Upstairs in a conference room in the tower overlooking the Hollywood Hills, Spacey spoke of “Beyond the Sea” like a portrait artist giddy to receive a royal commission but still fatigued and nervous awaiting the public display of his take on the king.

The actor spent three years honing his voice for the role. He spent equal amounts of energy working on the story and the film’s nonlinear, dreamlike styling, which he said finds its rhythm in Darin’s songs and heartbeat but adds the dreamy melody of a film beholden to Fellini’s “8 1/2 .” After he coaxed executives at Warner Bros. to part ways with the project after it spent a decade and a half spinning its wheels in the studio’s boardroom mud, he also had to raise more than $20 million to make the picture under the Lions Gate banner.

“At that time the consistent argument I would hear was, ‘Well, it’s a terrific script, the story is good, the music is terrific, we think you might be good in it, but how many people have really heard of Bobby Darin?’ ” Spacey said. “I would ask, ‘What difference does it make?’ The assumption is that people only go see films about well-known people if they know their story. I’ve never been quite sure why that doesn’t apply to fictional characters.”

Darin is a nonfiction character with a life that certainly presents opportunities for melodrama. Besides his race to fame before his heart gives out, there’s a family secret that creates an explosive situation in Darin’s life and internal struggles as well as a volatile relationship with movie star wife Sandra Dee, who is channeled in “Beyond the Sea” by actress Kate Bosworth.

Darin is also a bit of a fictional character in the film thanks to that nod to Fellini. There are scenes of Darin as a child (toting an ominously tick-tick-ticking pocket watch) reappearing for conversation with his adult self, including one at the funeral for the singer’s mother that finds a curtain in the rear of the chapel that rises to show a cheering theater audience awaiting the still-grieving Darin.

The film is more akin to the expectation-bending style of “Man on the Moon,” the Milos Forman study of Andy Kaufman’s life, than to any standard music biopic such as “Ray,” the Ray Charles life story that has been well received this season and, fairly or not, seemed destined to be a conjoined topic of discussion for “Beyond the Sea.”

“I’m glad ‘Ray’ came out,” Spacey said. “I think any musical or any music film is good for the genre and helping revive these types of movies.”

But while “Ray” has sequences of imaginary images, it uses the iconic singer’s recordings for its music and has nothing like the hyperreality sequences in “Beyond the Sea” in which the mundane world gives way to chorus-line dimensions. The film has big, showy musical numbers that recall some of the bolts-of-light-in-the-black creations of “Chicago.” But unlike that celebrated return to the fanciful tightrope of musical films, “Beyond the Sea” makes sharp turns back into a world that is very realistic and of the not-so-distant past.

And isn’t it a thin line between “Moulin Rouge” and “Cop Rock”? Spacey gave out a sharp, loud laugh. “Yes, that’s perfect, it’s true.” He laughed again. “I like that.”

Whether Spacey is channeling Darin or engaged in one of Hollywood’s most elaborate vanity projects will soon be decided.

The most pressing question about “Beyond the Sea” would seem to be this: Can Kevin Spacey sing? The answer is yes, by most accounts, which is why the lobby of the Wiltern LG theater was crowded Monday night. Spacey is on a 10-city tour with a 17-piece orchestra in a sort of ode to Darin that also serves as a promotional vehicle for the film and real, live proof that the actor is singing.

Before the show, a dashing man with an urgent expression and dark hair combed back like a shark’s fin stood at the will-call window. It was Dodd Darin, the singer’s son, who is not only an advocate for the film project but, as portrayed by a child actor in the film, an endearingly soulful character in the story.

“This is an amazing night, and Kevin Spacey has accomplished wonderful things with this film and with the attention it has focused on my father,” he said.

Early reviews of the film by less invested parties have been less upbeat, and some have been marked by a mocking tone that is reserved for musical flops. Spacey’s one concert performance before the Wiltern was also given a sour review by Times music critic Robert Hilburn.

But the Wiltern crowd was cheery for the two-time Oscar winner taking a tightrope walk as crooner. Wearing a tux topped by Darin’s bow tie, which was presented to him as token and totem by the singer’s relatives, Spacey looked out on a crowd dotted with Hollywood glitterati and praised Darin as one of the great talents of the ages.

In “Mack the Knife” he peppered the song with some of Darin’s finger-popping asides and tweaked the lyrics to say the killer was back in “L.A. town.”

“I am having,” he said a bit later, “the time of my life.”

A cross-country quest

His steps toward the microphone began in New York at a Greek coffee shop where he met with Phil Ramone, the longtime music producer who not only worked in the studio with Darin (as well as Sinatra) but also worked on films such as “A Star Is Born,” “Flashdance” and “White Nights.”

The pair had settled on the meeting place because they remembered it from their respective studies at Juilliard, which sits across the street from the trays of baklava.

The Grammy-winning producer was interested but taken aback at the core of Spacey’s plan for the movie: “If someone went to see this as a stage production they would expect the lead actor to sing -- so I want to sing.”

Spacey’s complete career as a recording artist before that afternoon was one track he performed on the soundtrack to the film “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” It was a stilted version of “Black Magic” that still makes the actor wince and wasn’t done any favors by its inclusion on a track list that includes Tony Bennett, Joe Williams and k.d. lang.

However, a few a cappella performances off the cuff persuaded Ramone to sign on to mentor Spacey as singer and to be the eventual film’s music supervisor. The pair would spend months laboring on Spacey’s voice and delivery and the delicate balance between mimicry and persuasive performance.

“Bobby was in fact a really good singer, if not a great singer, but his charm was in his timing and jazz styling, the way he would drop a beat,” Ramone said. “That’s a hard thing to teach, a hard thing to assimilate. Kevin spent two years living with the music. He had an iPod loaded with Darin, with himself, with the songs just as orchestral beds.... Some songs would flip, 16 bars of Bobby, then 16 bars of Kevin.”

Ramone compares the process to Robert De Niro’s famed and arduous sculpting of his body to inhabit the different life chapters of Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” One day, two years into the process, Spacey was at Abbey Road Studios in England, the legendary recording space for the Beatles, when Ramone heard something different coming through the speakers. “It wasn’t Bobby Darin. It wasn’t Kevin Spacey. It wasn’t slick imitation. It was what I was waiting for.”

If the film fails to get the world snapping its fingers with Darin’s music, Spacey will be able to heal any wounds by busying himself as the first American to be artistic director of London’s storied Old Vic Theatre, a world-class gig that will relegate Hollywood to a supporting role in his life for a few years.

And he will no longer need any mundane hairbrush to imagine himself as the great Bobby Darin.

There is a scene in the film in which Spacey-as-Darin smashes his own vinyl records in a fury. If you look closely, though, you’ll notice that the album sleeves were re-created for the moment, and that they feature Spacey in elaborate copies of those originals that his mother stared at for hours on end.

The actor doesn’t even try to dodge the question. “You know I kept every one of them.”