Between last week’s monster-mom — Laura Linney’s religious hypocrite in “Driving Lessons” — and this week’s — Annette Bening’s self-absorbed poet and Anne Sexton wannabe in the movie version of Augusten Burroughs’s best-selling memoir, “Running With Scissors” — I much prefer this week’s for sheer awfulness.

The trouble is that, as the movie-Augusten (Joseph Cross) tells us in his voice-over narration at the outset, she’s just a bit too awful. “Nobody’s going to believe me anyway,” he says.

This is not quite true, but it does point us to the paradox that Ms. Bening’s Deirdre would have been more believable if she had been fictional. Presented to us as the real Augusten’s mother in Ryan Murphy’s cinematic adaptation of the book, she taxes credulity in a way she would not have done had she been made up.

Belief does not quite stagger and fall beneath the burden it is forced to carry, but we nearly always feel it sweating and straining to hold up.

That it does hold up is mainly a tribute to Ms. Bening’s terrific, Oscar-worthy performance. Not only does she manage to make her own character look real, but that steadily-maintained reality at the center of the film is almost enough to prevent this story of craziness in the house of horrors where Augusten spends much of his childhood from spinning out of control.

Almost, but not quite. The house belongs to Dr. Finch (Brian Cox), the psychiatrist and guru to whom Deirdre surrenders not only her son, but her will, her critical faculties, and such common sense as she might once have possessed. He’s the kind of guy who, if he were fictional, would be criticized not just as too awful to believe, but as an utter caricature.

Mr. Burroughs has thus laid down a challenge: Disbelieve him if you dare, but Dr. Finch actually existed. Truth, they say, is stranger than fiction. As a moviegoer I rather resent such challenges, but as a skeptic with regard to the therapeutic culture, I confess to having enjoyed Dr. Finch and his whole household enormously.

Besides the doctor, there is his zombie-like wife Agnes (Jill Clayburgh), who watches vampire movies on TV while munching canine kibble; his dutiful daughter Hope (Gwyneth Paltrow),whom we first encounter lying on the couch in his “masturbatorium” beneath framed photos of the Queen of England and Golda Meir; his rebellious daughter Natalie (Evan Rachel Wood), to whom Augusten plays patient when she gets out his electroshock therapy machine; and, last but not least, his homicidal, gay adopted son, Neil Bookman (Joseph Fiennes).

All of these actors live up to the example set by Ms. Bening, but the cumulative effect of so much dysfunction concentrated in one place is to split the film in two — rather in the way that the young Augusten must have seen his life split in two.

On the one hand, there is his mother’s dream world of poetic distinction, and on the other there is this phantasmagorical circus of pathologies that might have been designed to distract him from the pain of his mother’s neglect.

It certainly distracts us. In one way, at least, the doctor and his household have been fictionalized, for what must have been for the real-life Augusten unspeakably dreadful about living in that house has become laugh-out-loud funny in the movie — though we may feel guilty about our laughter.

Not that mother is not funny as well. What can you do but laugh at someone who only takes time out from writing the poetic masterpiece that will finally get her, she thinks, on “The Merv Griffin Show” to decoupage her rejection letters. “I want a daily reminder of my artistic journey when I become famous,” she remarks. “It will keep me humble.”

But we can no more detach ourselves from her than Augusten can.

Dr. Finch is a malignant buffoon, but the boy whose childhood he helped to blight can now treat him as nothing more than a specimen presented for our examination. The best revenge, perhaps, comes from the grown-up Augusten’s having no more emotional stake, either of love or hate, in the memory of his absurd ménage. But it’s obviously a different story with his mother.

And it shows. Her casual and unrepentant destruction of her child’s home and family — not to mention that of her husband (Alec Baldwin) — in pursuit of a delusional poetic glory is unforgivable. That inert but deadly moral datum sits like an inoperable tumor at the heart of the fun that the mature Augusten has made of his young life, and the smile dies on our lips.

Artistically this is a shame, because it means the funny-serious movie never quite joins up with the funny-funny one. We have two points of view, one of the damaged Augusten and the other of the detached Augusten.

Both, to be sure, give us some splendid satire: of the narcissistic gospel of self-fulfillment and self-realization, of feminism, of psychotherapy, and of that which they all share — the 1960s models of confessional poetry and political and personal “liberation.”

But the emotional doubleness corresponding to this artistic dualism leaves us unsure about why we should care. Is this meant to be only Augusten’s not completely sad story or is it something more than that?

Is it, for instance, also a bullet to the heart of our soulless, self-seeking culture? It might well have been that, but neither Mr. Burroughs nor Mr. Murphy seems to have wanted to pull the trigger.

jbowman@nysun.com