A double life for 'Gong Show' creator?"Dangerous Mind" lets viewers decide whether TV impresario Chuck Barris was also a hit man.

If A Beautiful Mind had been set in the schlock-smudged corridors of game-show land instead of the ivied groves of academe, you could have called the movie Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.

Adapted from the "unauthorized autobiography" of Gong Show and Dating Game creator Chuck Barris - the manic trash-TV impresario who anticipated our current wave of "reality" programming (i.e., humiliation in front of millions) by several decades - the film has uncanny parallels to last year's highbrow Oscar-winner.

The difference: This time the protagonist isn't a Princeton brainiac who thinks he's working for the CIA, but a Bala Cynwyd-bred Hollywood hustler who thinks he's working for the CIA. Hit TV shows by day, hit man by night - or something to that effect.

George Clooney makes his directorial debut with Dangerous Mind - high-piling film stocks, lens changes, flashbacks and fantasy sequences like a crazed club sandwich - but redeeming things with his own arch performance as Barris' contact in the Agency, a G-man Clark Gable.

Sam Rockwell, the up-from-indie-pics thespian, dives headlong into the part of Barris, presenting him as a hopped-up, wigged-out schemer with an eye for the ladies and an Energizer bunny's unstoppability. Rockwell is really, really good.

One of the ladies that Barris turns his eye to is a mysterious beauty who calls herself Patricia (Julia Roberts), a dishy Mata Hari that the cloak-and-dagger daytime TV man meets in boites and bedrooms as he's touring Europe, ostensibly chaperoning game-show couples - but putting in the occasional murder in his spare time.

Whether Patricia is a figment of Barris' imagination or a flesh-and-blood coconspirator is something audiences will have to decide for themselves. Director Clooney, working from a sharp adaptation by Adaptation's Charlie Kaufman, offers only artsy ambiguity: These could be the demented pipe dreams of a wasted showbiz personality, or the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction scenarios of a killer cutup.

Where A Beautiful Mind had Jennifer Connelly to be the rock that stood by her flaky spouse as paranoia and intrigue circled all around, Dangerous Mind has Drew Barrymore. She portrays Penny Pacino, who stood by Barris through his infidelities and imbroglios and ended up marrying him. (Barris' post-ceremony, back-of-the-limo admission that he is actually a professional assassin elicits a hearty guffaw from his bride; Barrymore waits a beat or two after this dead-earnest declaration, wrinkles her brow in a nanosecond of puzzlement, and then just salutes the joke with a burst of mirth.)

Drizzled with real-life Barris associates (Dick Clark, Jaye P. Morgan, Jim Lange) and amusing cameos from the likes of Matt Damon and Brad Pitt, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is all about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations - no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall - to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

Maybe the title should have been Confusions of a Dangerous Mind, though the confusion, in this case, can be pretty sublime.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com.

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind *** (Out of four stars)

Produced by Andrew Lazar, directed by George Clooney, written by Charlie Kaufman, photography by Newton Thomas Sigel, music by Alex Wurman, distributed by Miramax Films.

Running time: 1 hour, 53 mins.

Chuck Barris. . . Sam Rockwell

Penny. . . Drew Barrymore

Jim Byrd. . . George Clooney

Patricia. . . Julia Roberts

Parent's guide: R (profanity, sex, violence)

Playing at: area theaters