Jackson Pollock - revered by Life magazine in 1949 as possibly the greatest living painter in the United States - could be, to put it mildly, a bit of a pain.

It's received wisdom that artists suffer for their art... but Pollock (Harris) took this a stage further and made everyone around him suffer for his art.

Not least his wife Lee Krasner (Gay Harden), whose own artistic efforts were effectively sidelined when her husband gained critical and commercial success.

Harris, who produces, directs and stars, lays himself open to accusations of a bloated vanity project... and after two hours of tantrums, painting and more tantrums its difficult not to disagree.

Pollock - a massively original and influential artist - is portrayed as a monstrous, self-obsessed bully whose neediness makes him all the more pathetic.

There's little charm evident in the man who invented the "drip technique", whereby the brush never actually touches the canvas but allows the paint to course off the bristles.

Evidence suggests Harris' take on Pollock (based on the biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith) is a pretty accurate one.

But that leaves us with a bloke who could whinge for America and no matter how much Harris method-acts Pollock splattering paint onto canvas, the fact remains he's not an attractive character.

There's excellent support from Gay Harden as well as Amy Madigan as patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim and Jeffrey Tambor as the acidic critic Clement Greenberg.

Val Kilmer also crops up as fellow abstract impressionist Willem DeKooning (though his false dentures make him look more like Dick Emery's off-the-wall vicar).

The bottom line is the film is a bit of a bore: there's only so much ranting you can take from a two-dimensional character who can knock out the occasionally pretty picture.

Tim Evans