‘Great Balls of Fire’ (PG-13)

Jerry Lee Lewis is almost certainly, as his character says in "Great Balls of Fire," going to hell pumpin' his piano; but this glossy glossover of a film bio is the closest he'll ever come to Hollywood heaven.

Low-country roughneck Jerry Lee Lewis was obsessed with deposing Elvis as the King of Rock 'n' Roll, but he was more like a military strongman, welding sound and fury into 12-bar sex with a dangerous disregard. (In fact, there is a startling echo of Jack Nicholson's glittering Joker in Dennis Quaid's demented Jerry Lee, shrieking "I am golden when I play that piano!" Sun Records producer Sam Phillips, played here as a snake-oil salesman, delivers the pitch, "When you put a black left hand with a white right hand, boy, that's rock 'n' roll." That was its power; that was its threat. "Black" (which almost certainly wasn't the word the real Phillips used) meant sex, and in the Bible Belt, that meant the devil.

In the space of six months in late 1957 and early '58, the blatantly licentious Lewis rocketed three singles onto Billboard's Top 10, starting with the frenetic bordello bop of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Going On." Six months later his career crash-landed amid publicity about his marriage to 13-year-old cousin Myra. "Great Balls of Fire," based on Myra Lewis's tell-all book, sticks to, or rather polishes up, those early years.

The acting is superb. Quaid, who practiced piano 12 hours a day (Lewis dubbed the vocals), has Lewis's megalomaniacal theatricality and perverse ignorance down perfectly, and his white-trash accent as well. Winona Ryder turns in a stunning performance as Myra, not only looking but feeling 13. And X frontman John Doe is quietly pathetic as Myra's father and Lewis's long-suffering sideman (along with guitarist Jimmie Vaughn and drummer Mojo Nixon).

Director Jim McBride (Quaid's "Big Easy") seems to have distrusted even his own script's power to make Lewis a sympathetic hero. A third of the movie is mindless sitcom stuff -- sudden "Grease"-style dance numbers and TV clips showing Beaver Cleaver's parents watching Lewis on the Steve Allen show -- that destroys the momentum the actors have built up.

The portrayal of blacks is casually insulting. The patrons of the roadhouse where Jerry Lee learns his licks are plantation-era stereotypes of carnality, and the beatifically unmolested black civil-rights marchers are the most egregious fiction in the whole film.

Worst of all, the script wastes its greatest dramatic possibility -- the inescapably twinned lives of Lewis and his cousin Jimmy Swaggart, played by Alec Baldwin. Instead of showing in both men the constant tug of God-and-Devil, their identical training as child evangelists (and their adult "performances") and mutual physical torment, McBride makes Swaggart a simpering prig.

The film closes with the title, "Jerry Lee Lewis is playing his heart out somewhere in America tonight." Playing, yes, but with more hands than heart, just like this film.