When some people want to get a free drink or maybe a one-night stand, they say they’re with the band. Alan Conway goes one further by claiming he is the band. In this case, Conway claims to be Stanley Kubrick. Just dropping that name is enough to excite anyone he’s around, and for one brief evening and maybe the cost of a bottle of cheap vodka,

As cons go, it’s a pretty good one. Just about everyone in the western hemisphere knows three or more movies Kubrick’s done, even if they don’t know the man himself. Likewise, nobody outside film buff circles could tell you what he looks like. Kubrick is famous without being ubiquitous. His work is artistic but still accessible. The mere claim turns Conway’s shabby clothing and strange mannerisms into artistic eccentricity. You can get away with a lot if you give someone a whiff of celebrity. By the time they’re pounding on the wrong door or calling the wrong number looking for you, you’re on to the next target of opportunity.

But a whiff of celebrity is, unfortunately, all that Colour Me Kubrick wants to give us. John Malkovich realizes Conway up to a point: a con man without a shred of conscience, adopting whatever role he needs to to continue his meager existence. He’s a “disaster queen,” as one of his many victim-lovers puts it, and a conman even to those closest to him. But that’s all we know. Beyond opportunism and a touch of sociopathy, we know nothing of Conway.

That sometimes-frustrating shallowness pervades and weakens all of Colour Me Kubrick, to the point where I honestly believed the movie could not end where it had. The film occasionally skirts on incoherence; who’s this kid with the spidery mustache popping up from time to time to hear about Conway’s latest con? Why are we only given glimpses of the New York Times reporter who finally got Conway’s number? Are we really to believe none of his victims wanted to press charges? What, if anything, was Kubrick’s reaction to this news?

The shallowness doesn’t quite sink the movie, but it comes close. That lack of exploration is curious. Director Billy Ray has twice shown us hints and clues of the interior life of a perpetual liar, first in Shattered Glass and then in Breach. Both were riveting, and both central performances (Hayden Christensen and Chris Cooper, respectively, both doing some of their best work) knew exactly how to walk the line between repellent and fascinating. You rooted for them, then hated them, then went back to feeling their impending sense of doom. It’s not that Malkovich isn’t up to the job. It’s that Anthony Frewin’s script isn’t. And while Ray’s work and Colour Me Kubrick may ultimately be getting at different things, the former’s strengths only highlight the latter’s weaknesses.

But, strangely, I didn’t hate it. Director Brian W. Cook, himself a friend of the real Kubrick, gives everything just the right layer of lowlife glitz. The visual and audio homages to Kubrick’s previous work are nice little easter eggs for fans of the great director. But the material is ultimately too weak to support anything that will stick with you a week or even a day after seeing it. Sad, that this tribute (however indirect) to a man of great vision has so little of its own impact.