Doing Time for Patsy Cline

In the hilarious Love Serenade and the haunting The Well, Australian actress Miranda Otto demonstrated screen-seizing charisma and effortless versatility. She shows more of the same in Chris Kennedy's Doing Time for Patsy; unfortunately the film tries too hard to muster charisma and versatility on its own. Otto is Patsy, the flame-haired, dolled-up moll of struggling huckster Boyd (an amusing Richard Roxburgh). Tooling through the Outback in a Jaguar, the two pick up cowboy-hatted Ralph (cute and callow Matt Day) en route to Nashville to make his fortune as a C&W singer.

Needled by the cynical, hyperactive Boyd, cooed at by the sweetly trashy Patsy (Otto injects some of Susan Sarandon's spine into a wispy Marilyn Monroe), Ralph ends his tense and tentatively comic road movie by sharing a cell with Boyd while Patsy flies the coop. They languish in their jailhouse squabbling and bonding; meanwhile she's wasted in a hackneyed, intercut Nashville-set fantasy sequence (or is it a flash-forward? -- either way it's a bad idea). Despite Otto's grace notes, much of this Time is hard labor.

-- Peter Keough