SISTER, SISTER

By RICHARD CORLISS

THE DRUMBEAT BEGAN AT THE Cannes Film Festival in May, and it is now more insistent than a migraine pulse. Jennifer Jason Leigh's performance in Georgia has won the sort of critics' raves that fuel studio campaigns for an Oscar nomination. This racket must cease. To praise Leigh in this small, frail film is to mistake big acting for good acting, and shriek for soul.

The movie, written by Leigh's mother Barbara Turner and directed by Ulu Grosbard, is a two-hander about the edgy relationship of show-biz sibs. Georgia (Mare Winningham) sings pop; she's famous and sensible, a caring mom and sister. Sadie (Leigh) sings barroom rock and thinks the way to be Janis Joplin is to do drugs, embarrass herself onstage and lurch toward an early, ugly death. At the mike, in the van, at the airport, she goes self-destructively, picturesquely nuts.

A daring, often endearing actress, Leigh virtually patented the role of neurotic little-girl-lost in such cable-ready classics as Sister, Sister and Miami Blues. Lately, though, strenuous mannerism has clotted her work: bizarre accents in The Hudsucker Proxy and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle, and, here, a surrender to the excesses of actressy masochism. As Sadie, she leaves no emotional scab unpicked. It's a role for which her voice, carriage and technique are ill suited; she's too small for these grandiloquent gestures. Georgia's big set piece is an eight-minute (or possibly eight-hour) Joplinesque song in which Leigh screams, whines and pleads "Take me back" while falling to pieces onstage. It's a startling, exhausting spectacle--and, like the rest of Leigh's performance, very, very bad.