• Georgia O'Keeffe: Her Life Was a Work of Art, 9 p.m. Saturday, Lifetime

The narrative form of the television biopic, especially a Lifetime Networks movie, is as ritualized as Kabuki theater: the dead legend is played by an actor vastly better-looking than the icon in question, and the arc of the subject's story is tweaked a bit to leach out all the banality and psychic freak shows that screw up ordinary existence.

In too many ways, Georgia O'Keeffe: Her Life Was a Work of Art follows the schematic. Produced by and starring Joan Allen -- the luminous beauty of such movies as The Ice Storm and The Upside of Anger -- the project entailed the cooperation of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in New Mexico. Allen, a gifted and innately poised actress, captures the clash of Midwestern repression and free-thinking bravery that informed O'Keeffe's life and channels the artist's regal bearing and the hard-fought dignity of her life.

O'Keeffe, who was born in 1887 in humdrum Sun Prairie, Wis., knocked around at teaching jobs before moving to New York and, in 1929, to New Mexico where she transformed herself into myth and then, inevitably, kitsch, all capes, white hair, carefully composed film documentaries and desert vistas out of John Ford.

That rare sort of genius who earned critical and popular acceptance, she kept working until her death at 98 in 1986. Allen's movie ends with the late-middle period of O'Keeffe's Big American Life, skipping over the estate battles with her heir, Juan Hamilton, a tall, handsome, 27-year-old devotee who wandered into her property in 1973 and never left.

Georgia O'Keeffe opens with the grand old party of art intoning ``I don't trust words . . .'' and then, after a whole lot of words, travels back to 1918, when the artist walks into New York's 291 Gallery, owned by Svengali and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who has displayed her work alongside the art of such masters as Pablo Picasso. Stieglitz, a rumpled artiste 25 years older, is perfectly portrayed by Jeremy Irons, an expert at cardboard gravitas and upright haplessness honed in such movies as Reversal of Fortune and the television mini-series Brideshead Revisted. Irons nails the passion, hustle and not-so-quiet desperation of Stieglitz's life, fueled by his love for O'Keeffe.

Stieglitz (``Your work doesn't become art until some rich person comes along and buys it'') leaves his well-born wife and becomes O'Keeffe's lover, husband and mythmaker, immortalizing her in nude portraits (``You're like a blast of sex'') that lit a fire under her career. Soon enough, the girl who had been a Podunk teacher at West Texas State Normal College fell into the fast set of Bohemia, cavorting with artist Paul Strand, revolutionary Emma Goldman and general rich person Mabel Dodge Stern, Tyne Daly putting a little too much Gypsy spin on the part.

Long before Stieglitz died in 1946, he and O'Keeffe had become another A Star is Born story: he tortured her with his affairs, and she just got bigger, richer and more imposing.

Written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Cristofer of The Contender and The Crucible, Georgia O'Keeffe is an intelligent and beautifully shot affair, but it's unduly earnest and nice. It would have been better -- and infinitely more real -- if actor and director Bob Balaban, of the juicy Doris Duke biography Bernard and Doris, had been a bit less polite. Legends don't get to be legends without leaving a wake of heartache.

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