Such common knowledge is precisely why Auto Focus, which chronicles the bizarre life and mysterious death of Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane, never rises above being a generic, redundant and episodic depiction of the rise and fall of a Hollywood star. Despite a sharp performance from Greg Kinnear (an Oscar-nominee for 1997's As Good as it Gets), director Paul Schrader loses focus with what's really at stake and fails to make the film the engrossing, unforgettable character study that it could have been.

After making a name for himself as a popular DJ in the mid-60's, aspiring actor Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) landed his first lead role in Hogan's Heroes, a television sitcom set in a German P.O.W. camp during World War II. Capitalizing on his fame, Crane's marriage hit the rocks as he embraced the swinging, freewheeling spirit of the 60's and befriended John Carpenter (Willem Dafoe), a sleazy technician who fueled Crane's addiction to sex by videotaping his outlandish adventures. Following the cancellation of Hogan's Heroes in 1971, Crane's downward spiral continued as his second marriage bit the dust and he floundered in dinner theater until his untimely--and still unsolved--murder in a Scottsdale, Arizona, apartment in 1978.

Given his penchant for making movies about conflicted, tortured anti-heroes, the polarized dual life of Bob Crane should have been the perfect stomping ground for a character-driven filmmaker like Paul Schrader (Affliction, American Gigolo, and the screenwriter of Taxi Driver). Unfortunately, certain degrees of compassion and emotional connection are missing, and as the film drags on, the real message behind the nature of sex addiction--or any addiction, for that matter--is surprisingly weak.

One fascinating aspect of the film is just how oblivious Crane and Carpenter were to the big picture of what they had at their fingertips. Rather than use what were basically the very first videotape machines to advance their careers, they used them for their own pleasure to document their many sexual conquests. At one point, Crane even suggests having actresses do a porn film for them, but they get sidetracked and continue being buried in their own addictions.

Greg Kinnear gives what is easily the strongest performance of his career and effortlessly captures Crane's naive, eager to please image--an image made all the more pathetic by his self-destructive inability to see that it conflicted with his perverse private life. Willem Dafoe is also strong as Kinnear's sleazy, symbiotic partner-in-crime, and director Schrader takes some creative liberties by adding some less-than-subtle homoerotic tendencies to his motives.