Shine.

The art world has its heroes and martyrs, too. David Helfgott, the pianist-hero of Shine, isn't well known in this country, but in his native Australia he's apparently something of a phenomenon. A success as a child prodigy in the 1950s, he suffered a mental breakdown that derailed his career and turned him into the sort of person Oliver Sacks writes about: a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings, and surreal wordplays compose a weirdly poetic discourse. After more than a decade of nonperformance, David inched his way back into music; loving and marrying the attractive, supportive Gillian gave him the strength for an acclaimed comeback.

The crux of the movie is the relationship between David and his father, Peter, a Polish Jew so spiritually harrowed and crimped by the Holocaust that he turned his home into a fortress. Though fostering his son's gift, Peter wanted only a local success for the boy since international renown would break up the family enclave. When the younger Helfgott rebelled, Peter pronounced him dead, and David's subsequent mental collapse after a triumphant concert may have been an unconscious submission to his father's wrath. After David's comeback, the old man acknowledged his son's accomplishment, then prepared himself for death. There could be only one strong male Helfgott.

What a turbid, Oedipally fraught scenario, yet how easily, how slickly the movie goes down the viewer's mental gullet! The subject matter is skimmed, never probed. Scriptwriter Jan Sardi and director Scott Hicks deliver all the inevitable moments in the most predictable ways: firelight reflected in old Helfgott's eyeglasses manifests his torment. Peter's banishment of his son is carried out by burning the scrapbook filled with David's press clippings. Pianistic ecstasy is supposed to be conveyed by the camera swooping about our hero as he whips up a Rachmaninoff storm. David's Royal College instructor warns him that "the piano is a monster! You've got to tame it!" Then, when his pupil breaks one of his instrument's strings during practice: "Ah, now we're getting somewhere!" (The equivalent of the young pug pulverizing the bag in a boxing movie.) And the onset of David's illness is shown by the youth thudding to the floor as if Mental Breakdown were a bruiser who tags his victims with solid rights to the jaw. Such visual and verbal cliches render this inherently powerful story silly or, at least soap opera-ish.

Yet Shine isn't dismissible, for its actors fill out their roles with the conviction this movie needs. As the adult David, the Australian stage star Geoffrey Rush, a James Woods etherealized, captures the blend of sweetness and torment in the pianist's nature. Noah Taylor has an even harder task in playing the adolescent David, since he must suggest that same sweetness and torment behind a listless exterior. (Helfgott's breakdown actually made him more communicative.) Taylor proves a master-minimalist.

The supporting cast is fine, with stand-out performances of Helfgott's two teachers. As an Australian instructor, Nicholas Bell conveys that special quality of a big fish in a small pond who wants his students to escape from the pond. David's grand old Royal College teacher is Sir John Gielgud, who is grand and old and royal and, one desperately hopes, immortal.

But Armin Mueller-Stahl, as the father, dominates this film as indefatigably as Peter dominates his family. This German actor gets everything: the survivor's guilt, the compulsive love that must consume, the raging of a plebeian Lear.

Shine may not live up to its title, but its cast gives off more than a few glints.