After three directorial efforts, I think it’s safe to say that Aaron Sorkin is a boring director. The celebrated scribe’s career began with early works like A Few Good Men and The Rock before rising to prominence pulling triple duties as writer, executive producer, and creator with NBC’s mega-hit The West Wing. Sorkin’s vocation hit a high note through the early aughts, earning an Academy Award nomination for his writing work on Moneyball and winning an Oscar for David Fincher’s excellent The Social Network – still his best work to date. Sorkin turned to directing with 2017 Molly’s Game and followed that decent-enough effort with the awards-desperate courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7. Both films revealed a creator that apes the style of other better directors with none of his own.

Being the Ricardos, the third film Sorkin has directed, is just as qualitatively bland as his previous cracks. For a film that boasts a strong cast – J.K. Simmons, Alia Shawkat, Tony Hale, Jake Lacy, Clark Gregg – and digs into one of television’s most enigmatic and charismatic stars, Lucille Ball, there’s no “it” factor to make Being the Ricardos sparkle. No sense of life or depth so much as impression and artifice. Sorkin’s aesthetic is equally lifeless with most scenes shot in the same medium frame with digital cinematography that feels flat and edgeless. It’s all just so…bleh.

Even from a penman position, Sorkin is quickly becoming a relic storyteller. His reworking of historical events work better when there is a clearly delineated sense of right and wrong so his works often paint in broad black vs. white strokes. He has made a career of making movies for armchair dads, Monday morning quarterbacking complex historical events to look simple and one-sided. That approach fails when applied to the capricious relationship shared between Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javiar Bardem) as Sorkin tries to navigate the outward drama of a Red Scare accusation lodged at Lucille and the inner turmoil of the pair’s romantic life to decidedly middling effect.

The film begins with a series of faux-interviews of the executive producer, showrunner, and writer of the monstrously popular “I Love Lucy” television series as they recall a particularly tumultuous week of shooting. Tensions on the RKO lot run high as Lucy faces down both the House Un-American Activities Committee and a bloodthirsty press hungry to make a story out of her questionable allegiance. On the defensive, Lucy to dig her heels into her work, rubbing many amongst the “I Love Lucy” staff the wrong way in the process. There’s also the lingering question of Desi’s fidelity, her Cuban-American husband off galavanting more nights than he spends at home. With the house of cards teetering, the famous funny-woman feels like she needs to fight for every inch of her life over the course of a harrowing week of shooting.

The framework of breaking Being the Ricardos up over an atypical week of the TV-making process – the table reading, blocking rehearsals, dry run, and live shoot in front of a studio audience – is a smart choice but the simplicity of that structure is convoluted by the wraparound fictional-non-fictional interview segments and then even further messied by an earlier timeline where Desi and Lucille fall in love and start a family. It’s just a lot to take in and though it gives us a sense of the obstacles these two had to face both from a professional and romantic standpoint, it seems a bit much all for the sake of being fancy.

The too-busy narrative story-within-a-story framework forestalls any momentum, particularly noticeable as the stakes of the film remain relatively low. Even those only very loosely familiar with “I Love Lucy” phenomenon are aware that the show was indeed a phenomenon – having a regular audience of 60 million weekly viewers. It’s safe to assume that the star of that show was never banished from public view during the height of McCarthyism. Sorkin tries to make a mountain out of a molehill, justifying Lucille’s professional worry with the additional layer of her deteriorating marriage and it just seems like an odd choice to focus the bulk of a Lucille Ball biopic on just how sad she was all the time. The sad clown act is well-played at this point. At its finest moments, Being the Ricardos wants to have something meaningful to say about the sad reality of this Hollywood couple who appeared to have it all – who shared a stage, show, and home together – but it was all turned out to be a mirage. I’m sure not sure it actually delivers on saying it.

Nicole Kidman has already received much early buzz for her turn as Lucille Ball but I personally found the performance to be somewhat creaky. Impressionistic. I never want to focus my criticism on physical appearance – I’d much rather a performer capture the spirit of their subject than merely look like them, and Kidman has done that her to a degree – but between whatever combination of makeup, computer-animated work, and plastic surgery Kidman is working with, her face is so smoothed over and rigid that it’s a constant distraction. She looks like a China doll and seems restricted to emote within that same range. To a degree, the plasticity becomes the performance, majorly out of sync with a comedian whose bread and butter was her physicality and expressions. It’s frankly painful to watch at times, this reanimated look that calls to mind the CGI necromancy of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing or the distracting digital de-aging of Robert DeNiro (The Irishman) or Will Smith (The Gemini Man). On the big screen, it’s impossible not to notice.

For my money, Bardem is the standout here, his natural charm and charisma matched to a role that lets the performer showcase his musical and frontman talents. After any biopic, audiences expect to leave the theater with a deeper understanding of the subjects and in some senses that is true with Being the Ricardos. I just wish that understanding of Lucille Ball ran deeper than your run-of-the-mill sad-clown routine.

CONCLUSION: ‘Being the Ricardos’ is an only serviceable Lucille Ball biopic that overdelivers on narrative artifice and under-delivers on stakes. Though Nicole Kidman is the big awards contender, Javier Bardem is the standout as Desi Arnaz.