Angelyne

Angelyne

Outside of LA, Angelyne is a mystery for most people. In 1984 a blonde bombshell appeared on multiple billboards all over the city with her name in pink lettering and a busty frame in one pin up pose or another. She was “famous for being famous” long before Paris Hilton or the Kardashians, selling herself (and nothing else), driving around in her bubblegum-pink Corvette, signing autographs for $35 a pop.

But who is Angelyne? According to Peacock’s limited series about her: “whatever Angelyne wants herself to be.” Based on Gary Baum’s articles on her for The Hollywood Reporter and created by Nancy Oliver (“True Blood,” “Six Feet Under”) and showrunner Allison Miller (“Brave New World”), “Angelyne” has fun with the lines between identity and delusion and does it with all the bouncy verve of the woman. It’s great.

“I am not a woman,” says Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) to herself at the top of the show. “I am an icon.” Her eyes are closed; she knows who she is. She’s manifesting! And that need for control over her own self-perception, and our perception of her, extends to the look of the thing, too; throughout “Angelyne,” which runs five episodes, she is seen shaping her reality. What results is a winking camp opus about the liberating power of delusion, and how far you can take a fantasy if you can get everyone else to believe in it along with you.

Each episode directed by Lucy Tcherniak (“The End of the F***king World”) or Matt Spicer (“Ingrid Goes West,” another arch tale of reinvention in LA) largely orbits around one man (or more) who gets sucked into Angelyne’s orbit and slings out the other side, a supporting player in her rags to riches??? story. There’s Freddy (Charlie Rowe), the himbo rocker whose up and coming rock band she yokos her way into, and promptly destroys to build publicity for herself.

Harold Wallach (Martin Freeman), the unassertive billboard printer who gets roped into being Angelyne’s manager by sheer force of will; Max Allen (Lukas Gage), who tried to film a documentary about her later years to no avail; Jeff Glasner (Alex Karpovsky), the fictionalized version of Baum who tries to dispassionately investigate her past; on. Often we’ll cut from the action to stylized, Errol Morris-esque talking head interviews with these men explaining how Angelyne evaded or hurt them.

But then! “Gross,” Angelyne pouts in response to a gross detail. “That never happened.” She takes control of the narrative again, and suddenly we’re seeing things from her perspective or at least what she wants us to believe is her perspective. This woman has completely made herself up life and persona and used sheer force of personality to keep inconvenient bits of reality at bay. “Angelyne” knows it, too; characters from her own past blink out of existence the moment she decides they don’t exist.

The show’s clearly a passion project for Rossum, who must have been looking for some kind of transformation after nine seasons spent as the rock-solid daughter in Showtime’s “Shameless,” set in a working class Chicago family. Where previously she played the sensible brunette, here she’s all wide-eyed bottle blonde hot pink Christmas ornament; tittering like Betty Boop between breathy Marilyn Monroe lines (“I strive for a painless existence”), Rossum does her best Lily James“Pam & Tommy” impression with 30 pounds of prosthetic breasts and as many foot-high blonde wigs as necessary to capture the real Angelyne’s cartoon proportions. She commands every room, allowing only the tiniest sliver of self peek through; it’s an incredible performance about performing.

My God, what layers there are: After all, both Angelyne and Rossum are women who want to redraw themselves so that everyone sees what they can do. “Marilyn didn’t rest until she was famous,” our girl says early on; even before we get a glimpse into Real Angelyne’s pre-Angelyne ness in the final episode, you can tell that star was somebody crucial a shiny happy sex symbol that everybody who mattered wanted to look at. And in LA, where all anybody wants is someone else to see them, Angelyne knew exactly how to make that happen, even if she didn’t have the pipes or acting talent necessary to leverage it into an actual career in entertainment. Any other details that get in the way of that illusion are just inconveniences.

It’s this push and pull between competing truths that makes “Angelyne” so sneakily funny, and sets it apart from all those recent miniseries about controversial real-life figures we’ve had to wade through lately. Whereas Elizabeth Holmes or Adam Neumann sold a lie, Angelyne sells a fantasy; the stakes aren’t lives or livelihoods here, but whether or not she gets to keep being beautiful and alluring and mysterious.

She surrounds herself with sycophants (Hamish Linklater’s gleefully dopey assistant Rick Krause being the most loyal) and carries an uncanny ability to spin any negative circumstance as a positive or pretend it never happened at all. (Rossum’s husband Sam Esmail of “Mr. Robot” also produces here, if you’re wondering how many layers of meta they eventually pile on.)

Whether you’re hearing about Angelyne for the first time, or you’re a longtime fan just hoping to see her legend given some justice onscreen in a way neither of those two things actually ever happens here don’t @ me there is still plenty to like: You will get a few glimmers of insight into what made this woman tick back in the day (though sadly no cameos), a few onion-like layers peeled back into one of LA’s biggest bombshell-bimbo mysteries.

However, the real power of ‘Angelyne’ is that it embraces a lie it celebrates the bright pink happiness she gives to herself and her followers just by being alive, while also acknowledging the pain and bewilderment she causes those left behind. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and so is fame.

Watch Angelyne For Free On Gomovies.