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Hewitt is unconvincing enough as a first time New Yorker complaining about a ridiculously cheap $300 a month rent on Fox's "Time of Your Life." And since Hewitt doesn't possess a trace of Hepburn's charm, grace or magnetism, the interminable biopic resorts to the crudest of script and visual cues. We remember that Hewitt is playing Audrey Hepburn only because she stiffly, emphatically keeps introducing herself that way. As if this were too ambiguous, Hewitt is occasionally shown sliding into various director's chairs, all clearly labeled "Audrey Hepburn." To say the role is a stretch gives Hewitt too much credit. Hewitt's accent is that of a child pretending to be a fairy princess, and her manner is that of a runway model dipped in molasses.

Hepburn's appeal was based in Old World elegance and New World daring. Her style, at the center of films from "Roman Holiday" to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" to "My Fair Lady," was modern but classic, reserved yet alluring. After a short career as a model and dancer, she found an audience in the 1950s and '60s as an alternative to the sexpot sirens who dominated the previous era. She may have been Dutch-English, but she represented something Americans aspire to: class.

Hewitt represents what Americans all too often really are: craven, opportunistic exhibitionists. Most Americans lack her rack, but many of us -- one way or another -- desire it. This may explain Hewitt's astonishing popularity. Aside from her stint on "Party of Five" and the new (but doomed) "Time of Your Life," Hewitt is the face that sold a thousand ad pages by appearing on the cover of the first Teen People, the magazine that's become one of the most successful launches of the decade.

And yet few other stars also arouse such antipathy, even among the generation of teenyboppers whose sole mission is to eradicate all traces of the early '90s (indie rock, riot grrrls, the fetishization of authenticity as a virtue). Hewitt is even hated by the fans of bounce-alikes such as Sarah Michelle Gellar; she's mocked by the same teens she tries to be a role model for. She's said that she won't do nude scenes or use drugs in movies because she doesn't want to do anything on screen that teens shouldn't do themselves. Clearly, that doesn't include being chased by an ax murderer in a wet T-shirt. I hate Jennifer Love Hewitt, too, although it's hard to articulate a good reason why.

"The Audrey Hepburn Story" helps, though. As a biopic, it's just this side of parody. Or just that side. Most of the story is told in clumsily edited flashback (sometimes flashing back from within a flashback) from a "present time" scene that appears to take all of half an hour.

Hepburn's own story is treated just as shabbily. The movie ends midcareer, leaving out her divorce from actor Mel Ferrer and some of her most important and demanding films ("The Children's Hour," "Wait Until Dark"), but also her work for UNICEF as a special ambassador to the United Nations. Maybe the filmmakers saw this as trivia, but even the events within the film's brief take on Hepburn's life are made trivial.

Hepburn's time in a refugee camp, for instance, is glossed over briefly, recklessly, even offensively. And earlier, living in Arnhem, Netherlands, on the eve of the Nazi occupation, Hewitt-as-Hepburn complains to her mother like a teen denied access to the family car: "But you said Germany would never invade Holland!" More important than these formative events apparently -- the entire movie itself hinges upon it -- is whether Hepburn can make Truman Capote smile.

There are many such opportunities to fustigate over the liberties taken with Hepburn's biography, but it is even more entertaining to see what they've done with her clothes. The famously fashionable Heburn is transformed into Christina Aguilera at the prom. Hemlines hike. Necklines plunge. As a performer who could act, sing and dance, Hepburn was what was known as a triple threat. When the busty Hewitt gathers up her most significant assets, however, she displays something more on the order of a double threat: left and right.

It may be a vague awareness of this discrepancy that propels the movie's most revealing subplot: the dancer Hepburn's struggle to learn how to act. Repeatedly, Hewitt-as-Hepburn demurs, "I'm not an actress" and "I can't act." The movie's most painful sequence is a five-minute interlude wherein Hepburn -- magically -- learns how. Would that Hewitt were capable of a similar feat.

There's no need for a 50-minute hour to see the depths of projection Hewitt has brought to the role. Most telling is the depiction of Hepburn's Academy Award win. No doubt Hewitt felt the Oscar acceptance was an important scene. No doubt it is the only time Hewitt will ever lay her hands on one. What may be most appalling about "The Audrey Hepburn Story," though, isn't its inaccuracies or even Hewitt's complete failure to capture Hepburn.

What's striking is the audacity she shows in even trying, and the travesty she makes while doing so. Entertainment is entertainment and for the most part I'm content to let bad television, bad music and bad movies lapse into the category of trivia answers and episodes of "Behind the Music," not quite forgotten, but mostly beside the point.

But "The Audrey Hepburn Story" galls because it's a model for what pop culture has become: the devouring of the past in order to make excrement for the future. Seen this way, Hewitt's inappropriateness as Hepburn almost makes sense; as Hewitt never intended to become Hepburn, she remade Hepburn to be more like her. This explains the biopic's portrayal of Hepburn as man-hungry (falling in love on every set) and petulant, an oddly adolescent pose for someone who in real life was robbed of those years.

Hewitt hasn't just made a bad movie, she's badly rewritten a life.

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