Annette Bening goes full-bore dame in "Running With Scissors," based on Augusten Burroughs's best-selling memoir, and the dame's damehood is frankly moored in mental illness, not creative eccentricity. This dame is as sick as a sick dog on a hot day, if still always perversely amusing, and the story is constructed as a survivor's ordeal, not a colorful picaresque.

The survivor is her son, Augusten (Joseph Cross). Some would say the disease afflicting Dierdre (Bening) is a narcissistic personality disorder or possibly manic-depression or even a psychosis in the form of unrelenting aggression. Dierdre has decided that she is a great poet, that the world is lucky to have her vast gift, and the fact that no magazine has deigned to print her verse shows that the world is engaged in a vast plot to deny her the fame and wealth she so clearly deserves.

Son and husband? Talk about being up a creek without a paddle. The hubby, played in alcoholic depression by Alec Baldwin, merely submits until he can take her accusations of betrayal no more, then conveniently disappears. The poor kid is stuck for life.

But if he's stuck with her, she's not stuck with him. In her quest for stability and validation, Dierdre turns herself (and her body, her money and her son) over to the charismatic Finch (Brian Cox), psychiatrist to the creative.

When Bening is all wound up and blowing the rafters off as the demented, repulsive/charming, self-deluded Dierdre, the movie has an engine. You may not approve, but the great Bening is so captivating you cannot look away. Alas, as the movie progresses, she seems to be gone longer and longer, leaving the film little to do except to chart poor Augusten's progress in the dilapidated, "Addams Family"-esque mansion inhabited by Finch and his hapless clan. These poor folks prove Sartre's dictum that hell is other people.

-- Stephen Hunter (Oct. 27, 2006)

Contains profanity, mild violence, sexual material and scenes of drug use.