He’s not there HBO’s Peter Sellers looks for the man behind the masks; also, The Librarian is overdue BY JOYCE MILLMAN

There have been plenty of bio-pics about damaged geniuses and tortured artists. After all, no one wants to pay money to see the life story of someone who was happy and sane. Most of these movies do manage to find the flicker of joy that art brought to these difficult lives. But by the accounts of his biographers, ex-wives, children, and friends, actor Peter Sellers had no joy in him. For all of his comedic invention, Sellers, who died of a heart attack in 1980, at the age of 54, was a miserable man who made everyone around him miserable too. And he regarded his talent for disappearing into character not as a gift but rather as an escape. "There is no me. I do not exist. There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed," he famously told Kermit the Frog on a 1978 episode of The Muppet Show. Sellers was a cipher.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (this Sunday, December 5, at 9 p.m. on HBO), a production of HBO Films and BBC Films, is an ambitious, strange, and ungainly movie, as kaleidoscopic as an acid trip. Its weirdness is partly the result of its main source material, Roger Lewis’s 1997 biography of the same name. That book is a deeply personal and eccentric appreciation of Sellers the actor and condemnation of Sellers the man. Spinning from one event to the next seemingly at random, it’s the celebrity-biography equivalent of attention-deficit disorder. (If it’s a straight chronological Sellers biography you’re looking for, try Ed Sikov’s insightful Mr. Strangelove.)

For the movie, scriptwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely and director Stephen Hopkins (24) attempt to reproduce the vibe of Lewis’s psycho bio but within a more traditional life-story structure. With Geoffrey Rush assuming the Herculean title role (and he’s up to the task), The Life and Death of Peter Sellers takes us through Sellers’s transition from radio (the BBC’s Goon Show) to movies (the seminal British comedies The Mouse That Roared and I’m All Right, Jack, in both of which he played multiple characters). We follow him as he conquers Hollywood in the Swinging Sixties (The Pink Panther, Dr. Strangelove, What’s New, Pussycat?) and succumbs to ’70s sex-and-drugs dissipation before returning to form in 1979’s Being There. There are period pop songs on the soundtrack and eye-popping re-creations of Sellers’s most famous movie sets (thanks to production designer Norman Garwood). And there’s a surreal sequence in which Sellers suffers a massive heart attack after a night of amyl-nitrate-assisted lovemaking with his bride of six weeks, actress Britt Ekland (Charlize Theron). As Sellers’s heart stops eight times on the operating table, he has an out-of-body experience that ends with him blowing up his characters — Grand Duchess Gloriana, Inspector Clouseau, President Merkin Muffley, and all the rest — with the bomb from Dr. Strangelove.

At crucial moments in the movie, Rush’s Sellers "becomes" the people in his life — his first wife, his parents, Dr. Strangelove director Stanley Kubrick, among others. In the full make-up and costume of these "characters," he breaks the fourth wall and comments on the action. It’s an unsettling, distracting, and (almost) brilliant touch that conveys Sellers’s megalomania and enormous self-absorption. The Peter Sellers of The Life and Death of Peter Sellers regards those closest to him as just shadows, no more or less real than the guises he slips into on screen. By becoming his long-suffering first wife, Anne (Emily Watson), for instance, Sellers rewrites their break-up scene as one in which she forgives him for his infidelity and cruelty. In his imagination, he’s able to control her and excuse his own rotten behavior.

And The Life and Death of Peter Sellers doesn’t stint on rotten behavior. Sellers remained an overgrown child, alternately pampered and verbally abused by his Sherman tank of a mum, Peg (a fierce, unbridled Miriam Margolyes), who was herself a former vaudeville performer. As an adult, Sellers still clung to Peg, yet he abandoned her on her deathbed. (Sellers’s father, Bill, played by Peter Vaughan, is depicted as a placid non-entity who eventually became the physical model for Sellers’s Chance the Gardener in Being There.) In the film, Sellers is portrayed pretty much the way his biographers see him — undisciplined, selfish, cold, manipulative, a serial philanderer, and a creepy stalker who convinces himself that his leading ladies (including Sophia Loren) are in love with him. He is also a shockingly immature, abusive father who retaliates for his son’s innocent attempt at fixing a scratch on Sellers’s Bentley by stomping the kid’s toy cars and trains to pieces. When Theron’s Ekland, sunny as a field of daisies, interrupts him on the toilet to tell him she’s pregnant, he tells her to have an abortion. And he punctuates his order with a "plop." (Ekland had the baby anyway.)

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers aims for a "warts and all" portrait but ends up being all warts. Indeed, the film makes you care so little for its subject that you might be compelled to turn it off were it not for Rush’s valiant mimicry. Despite acting through layers of make-up and prosthetics, he manages to create an actual person (or as much of a person as Sellers could be). With small glints of fleeting remorse, Rush gives us a Sellers who knows exactly what he’s doing to the people around him but chooses not to stop doing it. And though the film’s Sellers never grows as a person, he does exhibit self-awareness; he astutely identifies with the simpleton Chance in Being There, telling an associate, "How marvelous his life must be. No future, no past, no responsibilities. . . . People expect nothing of him and then they love it when they get just that."

The title of the film is meant to be ironic — Sellers’s fatal heart attack is never depicted. He ceased to exist, suggest the filmmakers, long before he departed this earth. It is a testament to both the intensity of Rush’s vanishing act and the undimmed brilliance of Sellers’s comic creations that the only times The Life and Death of Peter Sellers makes you laugh — or makes you feel anything approaching respect for Sellers — is when Rush note-perfectly brings Inspector Clouseau and Dr. Strangelove back to life.

AS A CARD-CARRYING LIBRARY FAN, let me say that the TV movie The Librarian: Quest for the Spear (also this Sunday, December 5, at 8 p.m. on TNT) is long overdue. It’s about time that professional book nerds were hailed as the true superheroes they are. Organizers of knowledge, guardians of freedom, librarians get little respect in these days of Google, bookstore/coffee warehouses, and the Patriot Act. There’s a whole generation of young people who think Starbucks is a suitable place to do homework, who think nothing of downloading music yet couldn’t find their way to a library (psst, that’s a place where you can take books home for free) with MapQuest.

Anyway, The Librarian: Quest for the Spear is exactly what the title suggests — a fantasy/action movie with a librarian as the hero. There isn’t a trick in it that Indiana Jones hasn’t pulled, but it has some unexpected pleasures. (There are plans to make other Librarian movies if this one pulls decent ratings.) Noah Wyle’s Flynn Carsen is a perpetual grad who is 30 years old, holds 22 degrees, and lives with his mommy (Olympia Dukakis). Flynn needs to get a life, and one appears in the form of an invitation to interview for a position at the Metropolitan Public Library. It turns out that Flynn is, by destiny, the Librarian, protector of all the greatest treasures of myth and history. The Ark of the Covenant, Pandora’s Box, Excalibur — they all exist, and they all reside in the basement of the library. The library is run by a mysterious stoop-shouldered man named Judson and his no-nonsense assistant, Charlene. Wait, here’s the good part: Charlene is played by Jane Curtin, snippy as ever, and Judson is Bob Newhart. Yes! Bob Newhart! And Newhart’s phlegmatic, stammered readings of florid lines like, "Trust me. This is . . . is . . . your destiny," give The Librarian its amiable, self-depreciating tone.

Flynn’s first mission is to retrieve the Spear of Destiny (pierced Jesus’s side, gives unlimited power to those who possess it), which has been stolen by the evil Serpent Brotherhood. The Brotherhood is headed by Edward Wilde (a very silly Kyle MacLachlan), the previous Librarian, who has gone over to the dark side. Wimpy Flynn is assisted by Library operative Nicole Noone (Sonja Walger), a tough-talking babe in regulation Old Navy tank top and cargo pants. Their pursuit of the Spear takes them from the Amazon to the Himalaya, leaving no special effect unturned, especially the ones we’ve seen a zillion times before (the disintegrating bridge, the jinxed pyramid). But Wyle’s geeky charm and the story’s glorification of book learnin’ are enough to keep the good vibes aloft and (please read this next part in the voice of Bob Newhart) prevent viewers from, uh, from check-checking out.