Danish director Per Fly makes glossy biopic of the popular Swedish singer Monica Zetterlund. The movie is a checklist of showbiz triumph-and-tragedy cliches, with emphasis on the downside: failed relationships, egomania, insecurity, booze, pills, etc. featuring the acting debut by singer-songwriter Edda Magnason.

In a rather dreary central hook, the woman born Eva Monica Nilsson is introduced with the chip on her shoulder already fully developed: Single mother to Eva-Lena (Nadja Christiansson), she is forever berated and belittled by her narrow-minded father (Kjell Bergqvist) for frequently abandoning her parental duties and provincial hometown to pursue what he considers a pipe dream.

At first, he’s right: Working in what’s considered a purely American medium, Swedish jazz musicians are hard-pressed to scrape together a living. A hoped-for big break turns humiliating when Eva is fired from a Manhattan club gig, simply because patrons find the sight of a beautiful white woman performing with an all-black backup trio too sexually suggestive for their pre-civil-rights-movement sensibilities. During this brief visit she’s also dissed by idol Ella Fitzgerald, who tells her to “sing about your own life” rather than “pretending to be somebody else” via U.S. blues and jazz covers.

Returning home, Eva takes that prickly advice to heart, asking well-known poet Beppe Wolgers (Johannes Wanselow) to pen song lyrics in Swedish despite her record label’s initial skepticism. While true-blue bassist Sture (Sverir Gudnason) pines patiently from the sidelines, she accumulates a long backlog of husbands and lovers — notably “I Am Curious (Yellow)” director Vilgot Sjöman (Oskar Thunberg) — who all eventually tire of her emotional neediness and out-of-control partying. Zetterlund met Sjöman during the filming of this Jörn Donner short film. Meanwhile, her fortunes continue to rise, growing to encompass legit-stage spectaculars, TV specials, film roles (though these go unmentioned, even her turns in Jan Troell’s celebrated diptych “The Emigrants” and “The New Land”), and collaborations with jazz greats including legendary pianist Bill Evans.

The movie ends on a pat, happy note, bidding Zetterlund adieu well before scoliosis made her later life painfully difficult. (She died in a 2005 apartment fire at age 67.)

Magnason doesn’t lip-synch to the subject’s original tracks but provides her own effective, similarly smoky and elegant vocals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIYBE1MZ1Ac

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ8H5W7gxac

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