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As one of Hollywood’s staunchest Republicans, the late James Stewart perhaps wouldn’t be rolling in his grave in response to “Jimmy,” a biopic that — in focusing rather less on his artistry than on his military service
— paints him in a glowingly conservative light. But either way, he deserves better than this hokey, superficial portrait, which lives up to the popular conception of Stewart as an all-American mensch and everyman hero, while finding precious little of interest to actually say about him, either as a human or as an icon. It’s buoyed by “Riverdale” star KJ Apa’s enthusiastic but thin portrayal, which mostly captures the star’s signature drawl and aw-shucks persona — but, like the film itself, grants him only a sentimental semblance of a soul.
Directed by Aaron Burns — whose previous two features were both produced by the streaming arm of Christian studio Affirm Films — and released by Fathom Entertainment, “Jimmy” isn’t explicitly faith-based, but it is at least faith-adjacent, with much emphasis on Stewart’s Presbyterian background, and more than one moment of religious epiphany when the chips are down. Not by accident is its most detailed glimpse of its subject’s Hollywood career a reconstruction of the famous bridge prayer scene in “It’s a Wonderful Life” — the scene that Stewart himself identified as his favorite from all his films.
These are all unsurprising choices to make in depicting a star who was largely loved by the public for his air of very ordinary decency, and whose career was marked by a rejection of Hollywood glamour and decadence in favor of family values and patriotic duty. But “Jimmy” conveys none of these qualities from the inside out, instead making its eponymous protagonist a bland vessel for a kind of one-size-fits-all virtue. As written by Justin Strawhand and played by Apa, Stewart isn’t so much the everyman of American cinema as an interchangeable nice guy with admittedly distinctive vocal mannerisms; when the film does try to get under his skin, it lands on a fairly generic snapshot of WWII-related PTSD.
It opens in medias res, with Stewart being pitched the idea for “It’s a Wonderful Life” by close friend and fellow Second World War serviceman Frank Capra (Max Casella) — and not being altogether sold on Capra’s claim that “a hundred years from now, this film will be remembered.” (That the director is almost certainly correct doesn’t excuse such strenuously on-the-nose writing.) We rewind five years: It’s 1941, and Stewart, fresh from his Academy Award win for “The Philadelphia Story,” has just received his draft letter from the U.S. Army. Louis B. Mayer (a ripe Jason Alexander) waves it away, keen that the star capitalize on his post-Oscar glory, while venomous gossip columnist Hedda Hopper (Sarah Drew) reports that Stewart has dodged the draft.
Stewart is further goaded by his stern, salt-of-the-earth father (Neal McDonough), who dismisses his son’s military aspirations in amusingly sneery fashion: “Go back to Hollywood and make peace with the fact that you are what you are.” Determined to serve, he finally enlists in the Air Force, cuing a five-year screen hiatus when America is pulled into the war, and he’s stationed in England as a bomber pilot for the 453rd Bombardment Group. There, he bonds with the less famous men under his command, engages in aerial combat that is shot in synthetic video game style, and enters into a tedious, fictionalized romance with brittly aristocratic Englishwoman Julia (Kara Killmer). And so the erstwhile movie star effectively lives a movie for a change, instead of making one.
None of this is particularly enlightening, and any opportunity to portray the conflict between Stewart’s celebrity, soldierly and civilian identities is squandered by the consistently phony, ennobling tone of proceedings. Our hero speaks mostly in clunky platitudes (“I’d like to look at myself in the mirror and see a good man looking back at me,” “I don’t want to be a god, I want to be man”) that wind up making him a bit of a pill. Besides, we hardly feel the seismic shift in worlds from backlot to battle, since DP James Mather applies the same smoothly gilded finish throughout; you can sense the camera rolling in every frame of the film, whether it’s capturing Hollywood artifice or not. At his lowest, most trauma-ridden point on the “It’s a Wonderful Life” shoot, Stewart is given advice that snaps him back into form: “What the audience needs is truth — are you brave enough to give it to them?” Jimmy ultimately is; “Jimmy,” not so much.
