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The comedy of not being able to let go -- or even get started -- should be at the center of "Joe Gould's Secret," Stanley Tucci's film of the famous Joseph Mitchell book. There are few journalists who have ever questioned themselves the way Mitchell did in that book. In 1942, Mitchell, a staff writer at the New Yorker from the end of the '30s until his death in 1996, published a piece called "Professor Sea Gull." It was a profile of a Greenwich Village street character named Joe Gould, a scruffy middle-aged exhibitionist who claimed to be working on an immense book called "An Oral History of Our Time."

Joe Gould's Secret Directed by Stanley Tucci Starring Tucci, Ian Holm, Hope Davis and Patricia Clarkson

As Gould explained it to Mitchell, the book would be a massive compendium of street talk, rumor, innuendo, tall tales -- history that took place in the gutter level rather than the hallowed halls. The few excerpts Gould had managed to publish in venues like the legendary literary magazine "The Dial earned him the admiration of e.e. cummings and William Saroyan, among others. When Gould wasn't carrying out the hours of work he claimed were devoted to the "Oral History," he was making the rounds of taverns, playing the role of Bohemian for the tourists, scrounging free drinks and handouts for what he called the Joe Gould Fund.

The profile elevated Gould from local oddball to loopy celebrity. Letters with contributions to the fund began to arrive at the New Yorker. But before the profile even ran, Mitchell was having his doubts. The excerpts of the "Oral History" that Gould showed him were barely varying versions of the same chapters. When Mitchell asked to see more, Gould had sets of excuses as to why the work was unavailable. And having written the piece, Mitchell found that he had unwittingly fallen into the role of Gould's confidant, condemned to spend evenings fighting sleep in bars as Gould carried on an incessant monologue, setting off on one digression after the other. One day, in a fit of anger, Mitchell blurted out that he believed the "Oral History" didn't really exist. The horrified look on Gould's face told him he was right. After that, their contact dwindled. Gould collapsed on the street in 1952, and died in a New York state mental hospital five years later. Mitchell maintained his silence until 1964, when he published the essay "Joe Gould's Secret" in the New Yorker.

It's an extraordinarily gentlemanly piece of writing. Mitchell gives the straight version of the facts he had glossed over in "Professor Sea Gull," including tales of Gould's petty thievery (in one instance at the expense of a friend who could least afford it) and his drunken abusiveness toward the people most willing to help him. But he also shows real compassion for Gould's failing to ever get down the work he envisioned in his head. In one key passage, Mitchell compares it to the idea for a novel he carried with him for some years without ever getting around to committing to paper. "Joe Gould's Secret" is the work of a man who is not proud of the hand he had in creating a myth, but who is equally ill at ease with the truth telling that being a journalist entails. That discomfort may have preyed on Mitchell: Except for an introduction to the 1992 collection of his work "Up in the Old Hotel," the essay was, for whatever reasons, the last thing the writer ever published.

Stanley Tucci's film, starring Tucci as Mitchell and Ian Holm as Gould, is faithful to the facts of the story and yet it's all wrong. It's carefully made, respectful and dull. Largely on the basis of his first picture as director, "Big Night" (co-directed with Campbell Scott), Tucci has acquired the reputation of being adept at actors' moments and quiet scenes. The affection he showered on the performances of Tony Shalhoub, Alison Janney and others in "Big Night" is what carried that picture. It was easy to understand the affection for a movie that trusted the audience to respond without squeezing the response out of them.

But Tucci isn't a filmmaker. There's no snap, no tension in his work, no evidence that he feels any excitement at working in the medium. In an early scene in "Joe Gould's Secret," Mitchell and his wife, Therese (Hope Davis), have breakfast with their two little daughters, who tell their father that the subject of his new piece sounds boring. There's none of the hubbub and ruckus of family life; everyone talks as if they were auditioning for NPR. Whenever Tucci shows us a scene of Mitchell's daughters getting into mischief -- indulging in a pillow fight or starting an impromptu game of keep-away with his fedora -- the only sound we hear is a sensitive piano tinkling on the soundtrack. This is a grown-up movie, folks, one where children are seen but not heard.

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