"Talent, will, and genius," George Sand wrote to Gustav Flaubert are "natural phenomena like the lake, the volcano, the mountain, the wind, the star, the cloud." Jackson Pollock, the artist best known for his "action paintings," was a volcanic talent. He broke through to the other side. The combustion and novelty of his art opened the doors of post World War II painting to the shifting, fluid, frustrated, electrified experience of urban living. He created a new visual rhythm birthed in his subconscious — a mélange of incomplete shapes, vanishing strokes, arbitrary emblems, and swirling colors.

Pollock is produced and directed by Ed Harris, who also plays the lead role. The screenplay by Barbara Turner and Susan J. Emshwiller is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. This labor of love, which covers over ten years in the life of the controversial and self-destructive artist, has taken Harris a decade to bring to the screen. With its multileveled exploration of art, creativity, and the bad psychic weather connected with fame, it is well worth the wait.

Covering a period from 1941 when Jackson Pollock (Ed Harris) first meets Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden) to his death in an automobile accident in 1956, the drama does a fine job introducing us to the most important figures in the artist's life. The Brooklyn born Krasner, a painter herself, is quite mesmerized by this unconventional fellow. They fall in love and marry. With his wife now handling his career, things take a positive turn when the heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan) shows his work and remains a steady patron of his art. However, during one of his frequent drinking binges, Pollock urinates in her fireplace.

In 1947 the couple move to East Hampton where Pollock manages to stop drinking for a while and creates his famous spilling, splattering, and dripping technique. The art critic Clement Greenberg (Jeffrey Tambor) champions his art and calls him "the most powerful painter in contemporary America." This praise leads to an article on Pollock in Life magazine in 1949 — its first on an abstract artist.

The film shows how Pollock's rise to celebrity status fueled his self-destructive tendencies. His need for constant attention and approval brought to the fore his demons — alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, suicidal tendencies, and violence. His life went into decline after 1951. Krasner, unable to deal any more with his drinking, depression, and extramarital affairs, finally left him.

At one point in his career, Jackson Pollock said to a friend, "Painting is no problem; the problem is what to do when you're not painting." This focused film probes that dimension of this unusual artist's life with aplomb.