“Confessions of a Dangerous Mind” offers an intriguing premise: What happens when George Clooney directs his “Ocean’s Eleven” co-star Julia Roberts, along with Drew Barrymore and her “Charlie’s Angels” co-star Sam Rockwell in a movie about “The Gong Show” host Chuck Barris’ alleged life as a CIA operative?

Or maybe the question is, how many throw-back, remake and big-screen-update references can be crammed into one movie description?

An entertaining, surreal film, lump “Confessions” in with “Auto Focus” — last fall’s Bob Crane biopic — for the “Secret Lives of Old, Crazy TV Stars” film festival.

Based on Barris’ “unauthorized autobiography,” the film faces the same challenge as the book: Will anyone believe this? Beyond the usual cinematic requirement to be as convincing as fiction, “Confessions” sets out to convince the audience that the events really happened and that goofy Chuck Barris led another life as a government-trained killer.

For Clooney’s directorial debut, he shows that he has paid attention to the craft of filmmaking. The look of each scene sets the tone, in both historical and emotional contexts. In a film built on duality (is this funny or is it true?), the direction admirably straddles the real and the bizarre.

In the central role, Rockwell carries the cast with a detailed impression of one of television’s most peculiar personalities. His performance — deliberately shallow as a man who regrets never striving for depth — is exceptional. If the film were limited to Rockwell inhabiting Barris’ environment, the audience would be totally sold on the film’s reality.

But, on that count, it ends up falling short. Though at times it pleasantly resembles one, this is not an independent film.

Real footage from “The Gong Show” and other Barris-related TV shows and interjections by real celebrities such as Dick Clark and Jaye P. Morgan (yes, she’s a real celebrity) serve to make us believe. But the prominent casting of top-level celebrities — Roberts, Barrymore and Clooney himself — distracts and detracts from the illusion.

Aside from the very amusing collision of fiction and reality as Julia Roberts licks the face of Chuck Barris, the big names keep us from being convinced. Whether Barris was or was not a secret agent remains the subject of opinion, but the believability of the film fails as the conspicuous Barrymore and Roberts fail to age over the twenty-year span of the film.

Barrymore’s acting also hurts the film. The assumption of Barris’ CIA past is more convincing than his relationship with Barrymore’s empty character.

The final strike against this otherwise enjoyable film is the strange fixation George Clooney seems to have carried from his “Solaris” experience. If anyone has ever fantasized about frequently viewing Chuck Barris’ backside, this is your film. However, that demographic may not do much to pad “Confessions”‘ box-office take.

Nonetheless, the movie looks good, throwing a little more warped reality into today’s narrow Hollywood spectrum as well as into the sanitized history of network television that it surreptitiously skewers. See it and realize: whether he killed people or not, Chuck Barris probably, for good and for bad, helped kill sterile television.

Grade: B