Leto adds unsettling weight to study of Lennon’s killer

People who don’t like “Chapter 27,” an undeniably clammy little picture, really, really don’t like it. It’s a small achievement, more like a filmed play than a fully conceived film, but I found writer-director Jarrett Schaefer’s fly-on-the-wall treatment of the last three days of Mark David Chapman’s obscurity a rather sly portrait in bland dementia.

Jared Leto gained 67 pounds to play John Lennon’s assassin, which in itself is interesting for about three seconds. Lindsay Lohan co-stars in a smallish role as Jude (she really was named Jude, for the record), one of the many nonpsychotic Lennon stalkerazzi hanging around West 72nd Street in front of the Dakota. (“Chapter 27” was completed well before Lohan’s notorious troubles with the law. That, too, is interesting for about three seconds.)

Lohan doesn’t do much with her scenes – what’s up with her habit of the nervous, giggling exhalation after every single line of dialogue? – but after a dangerously artificial-sounding voice-over at the beginning of the picture, Leto proves his mettle. This is his show. The actor doesn’t make the mistake of trying to scare us in a consciously florid way. The facts of what happened and the doughy facade of the 25-year-old at their center prove unsettling enough.

Taken from five key chapters (44 pages) in Jack Jones’ 1992 speculative nonfiction book “Let Me Take You Down,” the script is extremely simple. Leto’s Chapman is seen at his room at the West Side YMCA, freaking out about the men in the next room having sex; at the diner across the way from the Dakota with his new pal Jude; chatting up the various Dakota doormen, who are all too used to seeing geeks with “Double Fantasy” albums waiting for Lennon’s autograph; and, later, across Central Park West in the park, where Chapman and Jude run into Lennon and Yoko Ono’s nanny.

Young Sean’s in his stroller. Chapman, who had a way with kids, gives him his best wishes.

These scenes proceed without much dramatic inflection, which is a mixed blessing, but frankly I was steeling myself for the usual psycho-melodrama and was gratified by this approach. Chapman’s feverish identification with Holden Caulfield, from “The Catcher in the Rye,” comes in for a pretty heavy metaphoric workout. But by the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

“Chapter 27.” MPAA rating: R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 1 hour, 23 minutes. At the Landmark, 10850 West Pico at Westwood Boulevard, Los Angeles, (310) 281-8233; and Edwards University Town Center, 4245 Campus Drive, Irvine (949) 854-8818.