It takes some kind of balls to bring the life of the genius behind that painting to the screen, and Ed Harris' directorial debut, "Pollock," is clearly a labor of love, tempered with a healthy amount of respect -- perhaps too much. Harris, who also stars, has taken great care not to make an exploitative movie: He doesn't soft-pedal Pollock's alcoholism; his sometimes paralyzing self-doubt; his childlike and destructive dependence on his wife, fellow painter Lee Krasner (here played by the astonishing Marcia Gay Harden); but he doesn't glamorize them, either.

Yet there's so much measured delicacy to "Pollock" that it's almost the antithesis of who and what Pollock was. This is a precise, deliberate movie, so carefully calibrated in its tone and structure that, as a whole, it ends up reading like a completely well-intentioned lack of guts. Harris isn't a coward. The problem could be that he has so much nerve as an actor (it's evident here and in almost every frame of his career; he's among the best we've got) that he may have felt he needed to tone down the picture as it played out around him. But I'd like "Pollock" so much better if it were a passionate mess, if it made its mistakes in big loops instead of tiny scribbles. As it is, it's so respectful of Pollock that it's not quite worthy of the bastard he sometimes was.

"Pollock" does feel satisfyingly complete in terms of the way it covers the painter's life and career. If there are disadvantages to being as meticulous a director as Harris is here, there are pluses, too. "Pollock" covers everything from the painter's early days in Greenwich Village circa 1941, where his troubled partnership with Krasner began, to the years he spent in his studio at his home in East Hampton, Long Island, where his earlier cubist influences flowered into a style that was completely his own.

The movie fills in an impressive range of details, giving a sense of Pollock's awkward but affectionate bond with his mother (Sada Thompson), his relationships with his contemporaries (Val Kilmer, wearing marvelous prosthetic teeth, appears in a small role as Willem de Kooning) and the kind of music that influenced and energized him (he had a predilection for Gene Krupa and Artie Shaw). Harris works some fine embroidery on the friendships and unions that most deeply influenced Pollock, including those with art critic Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor), eccentrically brilliant patron of the arts Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan, in a roughed-up and funny performance) and, of course, Krasner.

Harris puts plenty of blood and soul into his portrayal of Pollock, revealing layers of complexity to the man that make perfect sense, given the way so many of his paintings are resolutely complete works of art that nonetheless feel like half-resolved conflicts. For all that's wrong with "Pollock," there's one thing that Harris does right: He never stoops to cheap psychoanalysis, even as he turns Pollock the man inside out before our very eyes. His performance illuminates the interior workings of the man without demystifying them: It's terrifically hard to play someone who's closed off to much of the world, but Harris gets it exactly right. You can see it in the way he declines his head ever so slightly when talking to another character, not so much avoiding eye contact as making that essential, tentative flicker of eye contact, or in the way his eyes sometimes show empty confusion that's already gone far beyond depressive despair.

Harris balances all that subtlety with a decisively masculine physicality in the way he shows how Pollock went at his work, lunging at a vertical canvas as if he fears it will walk away just as he's figured out what to put on it, or performing a Gene Kelly ballet on a canvas laid out flat on the ground, turning every arc of movement into a part of the finished painting. (There are moments when Harris seems to have completely internalized Jeff Beal's terrific musical score, and the complete effect comes off beautifully.) As an actor Harris is intuitive enough to know that you can't diagram creative genius on the screen, so he goes for something else here: His performance is a tone poem to an unknowable man.

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