So bad it’s almost (but not quite) good, Dan Ireland’s “Jolene” is an unusually elaborate and excruciatingly long vanity production based on a short story by E.L. Doctorow (“Ragtime”) about a young orphan who looks for (and finds) love in all the wrong places in the ’60s and ’70s.
Jessica Chastain, a red-haired newcomer who makes Bryce Dallas Howard look like a good actress by comparison, has the title role, which she plays over a decade beginning just before Jolene’s 16th birthday.
She’s already married to an idiot, who jumps off a bridge in South Carolina after learning his bride is sleeping with his uncle (an embarrassed-looking Dermot Mulroney).
The uncle ends up going to jail, while his wife (Theresa Russell) arranges for Jolene to spend some time in the juvenile pokey, where she gets very friendly with a lesbian counselor (a cringe-worthy Frances Fisher) who helps her escape.
Unfortunately, from there she sleeps her way to Phoenix, where she bags a tattoo artist/drug dealer/bigamist named Coco (Rupert Friend). And then there’s a Las Vegas gambler (Chazz Palmenteri) with underworld problems.
Refusing to learn from past mistakes, our incredibly stupid heroine marries a certifiable millionaire religious fanatic (Michael Vartan), who unfortunately doesn’t want to know about Jolene’s past until after she’s given birth to their child.
Like Doctorow’s story, “Jolene” ends with her arrival in Hollywood, but not until we’ve seen nearly as much gratuitous nudity and over-the-top acting as in “Showgirls.”
Fortunately for Chastain, “Jolene” is getting only a token release, three years after it was filmed. Few except critics will remember it when she appears as the female lead in the much-anticipated “The Tree of Life” in May.