It's a thankless task playing a famous person, but it's nearly impossible to play an icon. Icons have their own existences beyond the mere facts of their lives, so any attempt to portray one, no matter how good in itself, will inevitably fall short. Still, there's falling short, and then there's missing the mark entirely. And then there's James Dean: Live Fast, Die Young, a biopic about the icon of '50s teen rebellion that could just as easily be about Pat Boone or Roy Rogers. Starship Troopers and Tarzan And The Lost City star Casper Van Dien does his best, presumably, as Dean, portrayed here as an essentially nice, earnest young man who comes to Hollywood and has his heart broken when his love affair with Italian actress Pier Angeli (Carrie Mitchum, Robert Mitchum's granddaughter and Van Dien's real-life now-ex-wife) is thwarted by her mother (Diane Ladd). While the film does portray Dean as dying young, it has some curious ideas about living fast. In a performance that seems inspired by Luke Perry's work in early seasons of 90210, Van Dien does little that can be called transgressive aside from annoying police by breaking the speed limit. Monogamous, strappingly heterosexual, and with no bad habits more severe than annoying his directors, Van Dien's Dean would be more at home on the debate squad than hanging with the bad kids. Directed by Mardi Rustam with all the style of the reenactments in E!'s True Hollywood Story, Live Fast, Die Young is worse than sanitized; it's sterile, despite appearances by Robert Mitchum (as Giant director George Stevens) and Casey Kasem. Looking good by comparison, but still a minor ordeal, Finding Graceland features Harvey Keitel as a man who believes he's Elvis Presley. Drifting across America, Keitel hooks up with a tortured young man (Johnathon Schaech) still driving the badly damaged Cadillac in which his wife died, a vehicle that doesn't have a vanity plate reading "symbol," but should. You can practically see the psychic wounds healing as Schaech travels with Keitel from a seedy diner to a seedy hotel to a slightly less seedy casino that hosts a gathering of celebrity impersonators, among them Bridget Fonda as a Marilyn Monroe lookalike. Both self-consciously quirky and unsatifyingly conventional, Finding Graceland is watchable enough, but about as memorable as one of The King's own cinematic efforts. Keitel appears to be straining to get at the pain responsible for his character's insanity, but the film's sitcom-safe tone never lets him. That Priscilla Presley gets an executive-producer credit might explain the way Graceland plays it safe with Presley's image. It's funny the way icons of rebellion turn into marketable, carefully protected brand names with images greatly at odds with what made them so compelling to begin with. If either of these films accomplishes anything, it's by proving that more often than not, you're better off with the real thing. Maybe what becomes a legend most is leaving it alone.