Dennis Potter adapted his 1986 TV miniseries The Singing Detective into a film script before he died in 1995, and director Keith Gordon promised Potter's fans that he'd adhere strictly to the final draft. That was Gordon's first mistake. The original Singing Detective feverishly translated Potter's misogyny and his memories of a dirt-poor coal-town youth into the story of a pulp mystery writer who suffers from the same debilitating skin-and-bone disease Potter endured. The miniseries obsessively repeated scenes and images over the course of six hours, chopping up boyhood traumas, hospital doldrums, the plot of one of the hero's detective/espionage novels, and full-blown musical numbers. The remake bears the curse of distance: It was trimmed up by an artist far removed from his original inspiration, and the result feels hollow and sketchy. The cast doesn't do Gordon any favors, either. Robert Downey Jr. takes on the role of the sour, immobilized writer, looking back at his life for clues to when he became such a miserable bastard. But Downey is almost too rotten: There's not much connection between the bedridden jerk he plays and the wounded little boy whose humiliating family history erupts from internal anxiety to physical scars. Mel Gibson gives a nuanced performance in the bit part of Downey's psychologist, but cameos by the likes of Alfre Woodard, Adrien Brody, Jon Polito, Saul Rubinek, and Katie Holmes prove distracting. In addition, while a few early musical sequences have snap, the song-and-dance routines ultimately exist only as an apparent nod to the first Singing Detective instead of as the postmodern commentary that they're meant to provide. Gordon is a talented, ambitious filmmaker whose previous features include the moving political romance Waking The Dead and the soggy Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Mother Night. His work runs hot and cold, but he's not entirely to blame for this dispiriting muddle. The problem is caused mostly by Potter, and by his conversion of a wrenching tone poem into something more mildly diverting, akin to a jigsaw puzzle being reduced from 500 to 100 pieces. What this Singing Detective really needed was to be reworked top to bottom, preferably by a writer fleeing some demons of his own.