This one certainly makes good entertainment - which may be half the trouble.
It's the story of a California grandmother buying an abstract painting in a junk-shop for $5, and then being tipped-off that it looks like an original Jackson Pollock, worth up to $50 million, if proved genuine.
You don't have to dig very deep into the story before it starts to rattle, and not only because California is the natural habitat for wild theories of this sort. There is just too much of the pantomime about it all. The woman in question (Teri) is a long-distance truck-driver, who looks surprisingly genteel for one of that trade, as though she is posing as trailer-trash, with philistine opinions about abstract art - as echoed in the somewhat bowdlerised title of the film. She claims that a picture ought to 'look like something'. Well then, why choose such an unlikely present for a friend, when she could have found a nice harmless landscape or a bowl of fruit?
On come the experts, who are quick to remind us about 'provenance' - a word she claims she has never heard before. Thomas Hoving of the New York Met talks in an impossibly conceited way about his status as an authenticator of paintings, clearly acting a snob character-part, to get us taking sides in the big contest: connoisseurship v. folksy fireside wisdom.
Well, we certainly do take sides, even sometimes changing sides, as the evidence gradually comes to light. Apparently fingerprints have a lot to do with it, since Pollock despised the brush and palette. They even bring in a fingerprint expert from the Canadian Mounties - another over-theatrical touch. Two of the so-called experts insist that the painting is genuine, but it turns out that both of them were previously jailed for fraud. It is even claimed that the painting doesn't show enough evidence of Pollock's permanent drunkenness on the job!
Unfortunately, the closer you look at Teri, the more you conclude that she is just a little unhinged altogether. When she finally understood what provenance meant, she invented a colourful ancestry for the painting, and at least one expert swallowed it whole. Last heard-of, she had turned down a $9 million offer, still holding out for the big fifty, even though authentication is looking more elusive than ever. And it will take more than Joe Beam and his (excruciating) country song about her to get me voting against the smart-and-smarmy experts, as I believe I'm meant to.