AFTER seeing this film telling of the six-year relationship between flamboyant piano player Lee Liberace and the beautiful bisexual Scott Thorson, I came away unable to decide what possible reason could there have been for making it.

It’s not that the movie’s ill-made. Stephen Soderberg’s directing of Richard la Gravenese’s screenplay based on Thorson’s book is impressive. Encrusted with bling and other examples of questionable artistic taste, it looks good. Two major Hollywood actors about whom we have never heard any hint of gay predilections give convincing portrayals of men for whom other men are more sexually desirable than women (Thorson says he swings both ways but the film shows no women in sex scenes).

I felt uneasy watching the story of an undeniably talented keyboard player with money to burn and his plaything person. Not because the sex scenes involve men only. Not because Liberace was a bitchy dominant queen who controlled the lives of vulnerable young men as bedroom and stage playmates until someone prettier came along (apparently Thorson’s six-year tenure was a record). But the shallowness of all the film’s relationships is depressing, as la Gravenese probably intended.

Which is not to diminish the merit of Michael Douglas playing the mincing cross-dressing domineering feminised owner of what, according to Thorson, was a penis capable of prodigious staying power. Nor the quality of Matt Damon’s nuanced portrayal of Thorson, raised in foster homes, with ambitions to be a veterinary surgeon, paying an unhappy price for submerging his life to 24/7 demands of the celebrity source of wealth and luxury.

Good minor performances come from Rob Lowe as the surgeon Startz who prescribed a “California diet of pharmaceutical cocaine and amphetamines” to help Thorson lose weight and to which Thorson became addicted, and Dan Aykroyd as Liberace’s business manager. Debbie Reynolds, who performed on stage with Liberace, plays his mother.

At Palace Electric. Dendy and Capitol 6