Being the Ricardos — Aaron Sorkin goes behind the scenes of I Love Lucy

“Here’s what you got to understand,” characters in a framing device say of Fifties sitcom I Love Lucy in Being the Ricardos, Aaron Sorkin’s portrait of the vastly popular show and its star, Lucille Ball. A number of factoids — for instance, that water use across the US plunged while it was on — explain to viewers just how big a deal each was. How times change. Back in 2010, no one watching the Sorkin-scripted The Social Network needed telling how successful Mark Zuckerberg was. Still, the writer-director soon gets into familiar stride. Before we have even seen our subjects, a revelation is hung over their heads — “Lucille Ball is a communist!” — that might kill the whole shebang stone dead. And this, a caption points out, is only Monday.

Nicole Kidman is Ball; Javier Bardem plays Desi Arnaz, her husband on air and in real life. The Red scare is just the first drama of a time-bomb week, presented as at once pivotal and typical. Grand central themes — control, recognition, fidelity, ambition — are packed into the business of getting the show ready for Friday’s live taping.

We find Ball to be an expert professional klutz with a surgical eye for detail; Arnaz a Zen power behind the throne. As well as wrangling each other, both have to manage jittery executives and handle fellow performers to whom they are friend as well as boss. Among the co-stars are Alia Shawkat and JK Simmons. Show and movie each rely on a sturdy supporting cast, just one of many halls of mirrors: Lucy and Lucille, a fictional marriage and an actual one, a film about TV destined to be watched on small screens via Amazon.

In a movie much concerned with who gets credit for what, Sorkin is keen to point out that America wasn’t kept from running a bath by accident: Arnaz is quietly innovative, Ball creator and custodian of a unique brand of feminine slapstick. The film is percussive; never even vaguely dull. It is also miscast on both sides of the camera, Kidman entirely the wrong actor to play a physical comedian.

And Sorkin? What can you say about Sorkin that he hasn’t said himself? Whatever the context, whoever the subject, he still keeps nudging us into the backroom, hauling us along for the walk-and-talk, obsessing about process and power, the need to find and deliver exactly the right one-liner. About being Aaron Sorkin, in other words, making another Aaron Sorkin movie. “I understood the metaphor so long ago,” Bardem says, and so will you.

★★★☆☆

In US cinemas from December 10 and on Amazon Prime from December 21