Native American author Sherman Alexie made an auspicious leap from the page to the screen when he wrote the screenplay for Smoke Signals (1998), which was based on a couple of his stories. Directed by Chris Eyre, also Native American and making his feature debut, the film charmed and goaded with its wit, irony, humanity, and authenticity.

With his own directorial debut, Alexie demonstrates that he should stick to the keyboard. Telling the same story as in Signals minus the virtues, Dancing is too fancy by far — pretentious, narcissistic, humorless, and trite. Alexie stand-in Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams, who played a much more charming version of a similar character in Signals) is a successful gay Native American poet living in Seattle with Steven (Kevin Phillip), his white lover. ('They’re not you’re tribe. I’m your tribe,' is Steven’s contribution.) Needless to say, Seymour feels guilty about his good fortune, and when a friend dies back on the rez, he returns to face his misgivings about selling out, abandoning his people, and exploiting their misery. His punishment and ours is a dull farrago of flashbacks and bad poetry (the title comes from an early volume of Alexie’s poetry; to judge from the samples here, his switch to prose was a good idea). 'Seymour never wrote about laughter,' one of his friends back home acutely observes. 'He only cried.' This film could sure use some more yuks, and another director. (86 minutes)