In the mode of his 1987 Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent van Gogh is Paul Cox’s Nijinsky: The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. Derek Jacobi reads from the journal of the great Ballets Russes dancer, who was born in Kiev in 1890 and went on to star for Sergei Diaghilev in the likes of L’Après-midi d’un Faune and Petrouchka and Shéhérazade. Nijinsky began his journal in January 1919; seven weeks later he was committed to a sanitarium for the mentally ill, where he spent the remaining 30 years of his life.

Since Nijinsky’s is the only voice we hear, watching this movie is like being locked up with him. "I understand the truth, for I feel deeply about things. . . . I feel what Christ felt, I am like Buddha." Jacobi makes all this more tedious still by reading it as if he were Star Trek’s Lieutenant Data. We get occasional photos of Nijinsky (none of him in action exist); Cox fills out the hour and a half with his trademark shots of water and birds (cranes predominate) and flurried camera movement, and from time a dancer dressed up as Petrouchka staggers crazily through the woods. There are also re-created bits from Le Spectre de la Rose plus an outdoor staging of L’Après-midi d’un Faune that attests to Nijinsky’s charisma, since nothing else could redeem this choreography. Unfortunately, his art, unlike Van Gogh’s, can’t be represented on screen, and we’re not privy to his thoughts in the years before the darkness fell. In the end, this movie tells us more about Paul Cox than it does about Nijinsky. (95 minutes)