There will be many who marvel at the performance of Geoffrey Rush in the title role of “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,” which debuts this Sunday night at 9 p.m. It will no doubt earn him the Emmy nominations that the cable channel so loves to collect. Already critics have been lining up to pay tribute to the latest HBO grab for the Sunday night audience – the intelligent television watchers it abandoned to ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” this fall. But audiences will not be fooled into thinking that they’re being entertained. “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” represents the biopic form at its absolute worst; it milks every cliche imaginable to denigrate Sellers’ enormous achievements, and it smears his reputation without mercy.

There’s no question the tortured life of Peter Sellers might have been worthy of consideration by the proper writer and director. He shot to stardom in the late 1950s and early 1960s – despite his decidedly bookish appearance – pioneering the multiple-char acter comic performance in classics like “The Mouse That Roared” and “Dr. Strangelove” and captivating critics and audiences with edgy, charming star turns in “The World of Henry Orient” and “Lolita.” He left his wife and children and worked his way through famous women, achieving a personal best with his marriage to Swedish Bond girl Britt Ekland. His affection for drink and drugs marred what might have been a meteoric career, and the denouement seemed the direct result of his having embraced his comic personas without evolving a clear sense of his own identity. That theme was explored poignantly in Sellers’s last serious film, “Being There,” Hal Ashby’s 1979 existential triumph, which earned the actor his only Academy Award nomination.

But the conceit of “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” has little to do with a coherent examination of the foibles that may have fostered his genius. Instead, director Stephen Hopkins has chosen to glide past the central highlights of Sellers’s life and focus instead on the deep, dark lows. He keeps his camera tight on every horrible nuance of Sellers’s flaws – from the immediate disdain for his family that followed his sudden stardom in the early 1960s to his pathetic yearning for social and sexual acceptance by the beautiful movie stars he held in awe. Mr. Hopkins passes over huge chunks of Sellers’s rise and fall and in so doing abandons any hope of delivering a definitive biography of one of the most gifted comic actors in movie history. Perhaps the producers should have known better than to trust Sellers’s story to a director whose most memorable credits to date are “Lost in Space” and the pilot episode of “24.”

The movie lunges directly into the standard cliches of the form, with its perfunctory presentation of Sellers as a dysfunctional child. Unlike the abusive father in last season’s “Gleason” on CBS, Sellers suffers from a smothering relationship with his mother, who pushes him relentlessly towards stardom despite his own profound insecurities. While it might have seemed interesting to dwell for a few minutes on Sellers’s remarkable rise to fame, the movie instead tells the entire story with a standard issue audition sequence, in which Sellers, after already having been rejected, gets a movie role by auditioning in makeup in front of the same casting agent, and of course fooling her. It then cuts past his first success to years later, when Sellers has established himself as a star, and is hopelessly in love with his co-star in “The Millionairess,” Sophia Loren.

It’s the Loren sequence that’s bound to drive discerning viewers back to “Desperate Housewives.” Sellers has somehow deluded himself into thinking that he can win over the married Italian sex symbol, and invites her to a lavish dinner designed to charm her into bed. “What would you say to a little fish?” the waiter asks, to which we’re meant to believe the on-the-make actor actually replied, “I would probably say, ‘Hello, little fish!'” (Among the travesties here is the laugh-free script by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.) Sellers continues his ludicrous seduction, suggesting that Loren is as desperate for him as he is for her, while she keeps asking why his wife isn’t there. It turns out she’s home contemplating sex with the contractor. Wouldn’t you rather be watching ABC right about now? Eva Longoria is probably having sex with the gardener!

These feeble scenes get interrupted on occasion by the same self-conscious device that fueled Sellers’s success and no doubt helped attract the Oscar winning Mr. Rush to the part: the chance to play multiple roles. But while Sellers did so at the behest of brilliant directors like Stanley Kubrick (who, in “Dr. Strangelove,” used Sellers’s character-switching to deliver an ironic commentary on the conflicts within the military industrial complex), Mr. Rush only uses the technique to shows his own hubris as an actor. At various points he dons wigs and hats, and speaks directly to the camera in the personae of Sellers’s wife, Stanley Kubrick, and other characters; one particularly nauseating sequence involves Mr. Rush (in costume to resemble the first Mrs. Sellers, as played by Emily Watson) narrating black-and-white footage of his disintegrating marriage. “Oh Peter, I love you so much,” he says, mocking her voice, “I’m so sorry I hurt you.” Of course it was Sellers who hurt his wife and his family – in the standard, second-rate biopic tradition of drunken rampages and inappropriate gifts. At one point, to compensate for his absence, Sellers gives his 8-year-old daughter a motorcycle for her birthday, delivered by messenger. How heartless!

Remarkably, Mr. Hopkins has assembled a first-rate cast of actors to interpret this joyless mess. John Lithgow turns up halfway through as Blake Edwards, the director who shepherded Sellers to superstardom with “The Pink Panther” and who Sellers turns out to loathe, for reasons left largely unexplained. The late arrival of Charlize Theron as Britt Ekland isn’t enough to inject life into this turgid tale; by then Sellers has become an enraged, bitter star past his prime, suffering heart attacks and taking career advice from a psychic. Ms. Theron looks as though she can barely stand to look at Sellers, let alone kiss him – probably not what the script ordered, but a refreshing bit of honest acting in the movie’s final act. Stanley Tucci weighs in with a rendition of Stanley Kubrick that seems fully devoid of the director’s famous eccentricities.

As for Mr. Rush – well, I guess he does deserve some credit for looking a lot like Peter Sellers, and for doing a serviceable job of recreating some of the actor’s finest performances. Still, I’ve seen more complex and nuanced impressions from Daryl Hammond on “Saturday Night Live.” There’s a passably funny scene in which Sellers has lunch with his mother on the set of “Dr. Strangelove” and can’t shake the Strangelove character; his arm keeps shooting out in the Nazi salute, as he so famously does in the movie’s war-room sequence. But no amount of bravura acting can turn “The Life and Death of Peter Sellers” into something more than a typical network-style Sunday-night sweeps stunt, unworthy of the HBO brand.