'The Eyes of Tammy Faye' review: Jessica Chastain finds the soul beneath the sparkle

Jessica Chastain is about to fire up the Oscar race for best actress. "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," now in theaters, is the shaky vehicle that allows her to strut her stuff as Tammy Faye Bakker, the televangelist with eyelashes for days and a sunny attitude no dark clouds could shade.

The movie, directed by Michael Showalter ("The Big Sick") follows the rise, fall and rise again formula of most biopics. But if there's a virtuoso at the center of these allegedly true stories, biopics will get you every time. "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," based on the 2000 documentary of the same name, will get you good, if Chastain has anything to say about it.

And as a producer on the film, as well as its star, Chastain says plenty. Her tour de force aims to redeem Tammy Faye's reputation as a cultural joke in clown makeup. Chastain plays her as a female warrior in the male-dominated Christian right, willing and able to battle against their partisan politics and condemnation of alternative lifestyles.

The devil of the piece is Jim Bakker (Andrew Garfield), the young preacher she met and married and built an empire with during the 1970s and 1980s on the top-rated evangelical TV shows "The PTL (Praise the Lord) Club" and "The 700 Club."

It was Tammy Faye's stern mother, Rachel (Cherry Jones), who noticed something fishy about Jim when Tammy Faye brought him home as her husband. Rachel doesn't cotton to Jim's ambition to serve God with all the comforts a collection plate could provide.

And Jim sure used Tammy Faye's larger-than-life personality and enthusiastic hymn singing to win over the multitudes. Even as a child in the 1950s, Tammy Faye LaValley (Chandler Head) knew how to put on a show, writhing on the church floor and speaking in tongues. Rachel was appalled, but parishioners loved Tammy Faye and and the movie shows how much she loved their addictive approval.

The film is annoyingly vague about how much Tammy Faye knew about her husband's wandering eye toward men and his slippery dealings with church finances. But when Jim was convicted of fraud at his 1989 trial, Jerry Falwell (Vincent D'Onofrio), the Southern Baptist pastor who co-founded the Moral Majority a decade earlier, cast Tammy Faye out as well.

But never count out Tammy Faye. The movie sure doesn't. And you won't be able to keep your eyes off Chastain, whether she's giving Falwell a piece of her mind at a table full of dismissive men or whipping up congregants to a frenzy with her vocal pyrotechnics.

The connect-the-dots script by Abe Sylvia ("Dead to Me," "Nurse Jackie") doesn't skimp on showing Tammy Faye's descent into drugs and depression. Where it fails is at showing any intimate connection between Tammy Faye and Jim.

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Chastain and Garfield are skilled actors, but the domestic scenes of Tammy Faye and Jim at home show a couple interacting with the same clownish fakery they show to the cameras on their TV shows. As a couple, the Bakkers are made of the stiffest cardboard.

Luckily, Chastain gives Tammy Faye the inner life the movie needs. Whether she's noting that the makeup spackle and tattooed eyebrows that cover her face is "the real me" or showing empathy to AIDS activist Steve Pieters (Randy Havens) in a TV interview that made her a gay icon, Chastain delivers a performance that finds the soul beneath the sparkle.

Tammy Faye died of lung cancer in 2007, a shadow of her former self at 65 pounds. Chastain uses "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" to make her whole again as a vibrant force in her own right, not as a reflection of any man or movement. In every sense of the word, that's a blessing.