By Dennis Harvey

JOHN TRAVOLTA'S "comeback" Pulp Fiction performance wasn't that movie's sharpest or most original. Indeed, it let him coast on the goodwill accrued by certain key prior roles. But everyone was ecstatic that fortune had struck Vinnie Barbarino again, and with good reason – Pulp made it OK to openly love an actor who'd been a guilty pleasure for too long.

Travolta is a very deft actor at times. But he's primarily a movie star – even when he was a failed one – and semicampy icon. Not to mention a big hairy hunka man, as lush, goofy, and excessive a sex symbol in his first heyday as Jayne Mansfield was in hers. It's hard to resist enjoying his stardom as much as he obviously does. The guy's a shiny, vulgar American success dream in action.

But oh, the pain. It's been equally hard to resist wincing at how frequently (and, it seems, obviously) he's blown it. The first time around he was incredibly lucky with, as well as good in, Welcome Back, Kotter; Carrie; Saturday Night Fever; and Grease. Then he was really unlucky, and looked like a chump, in several disasters: fooling nobody with cow eyes toward Lily Tomlin in Moment by Moment, aerobi-sexy opposite Perfect's fellow leo-tard Jamie Lee Curtis, unwisely reunited with Olivia Neutron-Bomb in Two of a Kind, and delivering Tony Manero unto the extreme camp of Sylvester Stallone-directed Fever sequel Staying Alive. Has any other A-list star made so many back-to-back, infamously crap films?

A couple of less-embarrassing exercises – Urban Cowboy, Blow Out – weren't enough to stop the career mud slide. Travolta disappeared for years; his new films went unreleased or direct to video, and his stooge role in three Look Who's Talking movies was the most damning development of all.

Then, Pulp Fiction. Buoyed by award nominations and audience delight, he was gold again. Who could begrudge him going for a few purely big-buck gigs? There were a handful of interesting choices among them, even if in the best one (The Thin Red Line) he was the worst amid too many celebrity cameos.

But jeez. The serial mediocrity of so many rote mall flicks wreaked Staying Alive-grade damage once again. What do you remember from the sum of Mad City, The General's Daughter, Michael, Phenomenon, A Civil Action, Broken Arrow, Face/Off, Swordfish, Domestic Disturbance, Lucky Numbers, Basic, and The Punisher? These films are as generic as their names. Universally reviled flop Battlefield Earth was something else: a disastrously expensive ode to Travolta's Scientology leanings, faithfully blind to the idiocies of L. Ron Hubbard's sci-fi prose, and stunningly awful (the actor's own performance not exempted). Earth was an ego-driven catastrophe of the sort that makes one respect somebody's sheer, daft willfulness – if not their judgment.

Travolta hasn't had a hit in a while, let alone a critical triumph. He's now stumping for his latest, A Love Song for Bobby Long, on the pre-Oscar circuit, despite a severe paucity of favorable reception thus far. Again, I worry about him. Doesn't he recognize how silly, how actorish this movie makes him look? How generally bogus Bobby Long is?

Travolta plays (duh) Bobby, a former English professor now living in alcoholic squalor, sharing a decrepit outer-New Orleans residence with similarly overimbibing former student Lawson (Gabriel Macht, awfully buff for a boozy layabout). When the third housemate (and the home's owner) dies, she wills the joint equally to Bobby, Lawson, and her estranged daughter, Pursy (Scarlett Johansson). The latter, escaping stereotype trailer-trash life on Florida's "redneck riviera," arrives to claim her inheritance and turn up her nose at the losers already ensconced there. My Fair Lady-like formula educating, belated fathering, and romancing ensue.

First-time feature writer-director Shainee Gabel's adaptation of novelist Ronald Everett Capps's underacclaimed Off Magazine Street takes considerable liberty with the source material. But her story simplifications are outstripped by directorial missteps. Bobby Long reduces the hypnotic, almost narcoleptic rhythms of N.O. life to retro Southern clichés. Benevolently silent, smiling black extras nod approval as soulful white dudes serve up the "blues": Travolta croons Elizabethan folk classic "Barbara Allen" (!?), while Capps's son Grayson Capps makes like a white B.B. King in several overgroomed club scenes. The trashy neighborhood environs are lensed in folio-worthy compositions by cinematographer Elliot Davis. Gorgeous pastel building interiors and exteriors are so exquisitely distressed by production designer Sharon Lomofsky that I wish she'd make over my bathroom – which is far more credibly decrepit than anything in this faux-dumpster-diving movie.

Like A Confederacy of Dunces mistaking itself for Suddenly, Last Summer, Bobby Long is pseudo-literary Southern drama at its rotting-meat worst. It sports "wistful" voice-over narration and platitudinous dialogue right out of LitShit 101, name-checks upscale authors (Carson McCullers, T.S. Eliot, and William S. Burroughs), and pretends the film's big narrative "surprise" isn't obvious from frame one. Meant to be prematurely aged by dissipation, Travolta looks head- and chin-sprayed with Albino-4-a-Day. His rumpled act (including reprising his all-purpose-hick Clinton drawl from Primary Colors) is as dumb a notion of "real" as your average 22-year-old acting school student's stab at John Patrick Shanley or Goodfellas. He's hit the Oscar trail for this?

Still, I think Johansson is in even worse trouble – the everygirl naturalism that worked for her in Lost in Translation now suggests she has no other resources, no ability to stretch or prevent viewer boredom. Travolta's place in movie history – however bumpy – is already assured; his costar's might yet turn out to be no more.

'A Love Song for Bobby Long' opens Fri/28 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock for show times.