The diverting "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" is a gentler but odder version of "What's Love Got to Do With It." This time the successful musician is Frankie Lymon, a Harlem talent who in 1955 wrote and recorded the doo-wop hit of this movie's title, which launched him and his backup group, The Teenagers, to fame.

Lymon, a gifted singer and dancer with charm and ambition, blew it all through erratic behavior, irresponsibility, heroin use and bigamy, dying broke of an overdose in the late 1960s.

The movie, a fictionalized account written by first-time feature writer Tina Andrews and directed by Gregory Nava ( "Mi Familia," "El Norte" ), focuses on the three women Lymon evidently married without benefit of the occasional divorces. After Lymon's death, wife number one, Elizabeth (the energetic Vivica A. Fox), then serving time for shoplifting, learned that Diana Ross was making a bundle covering "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." Elizabeth wanted a part of the action and called a lawyer. She filed suit and the ensuing publicity brought wives two and three out of the woodwork for their pieces of the pie.

The scenes in the courtroom, presided over by a judge played amusingly by Pamela Reed, showcase the three wronged women giving their recollections of events. Based on these narratives, it would be easy to conclude that they were married to different men, but Lymon, played by the charismatic Larenz Tate, though small in stature, was apparently large enough in personality to embody different someones to please each of them.

The soundtrack, with Lymon singing, is great. And the performances are divine throughout. Even Little Richard, playing himself, projects just the right manic tone, and Paul Mazursky, as the record producer who stole Lymon's money, is perfectly sleazy.

The trouble with the movie, which is beautifully shot by Edward Lachman and imaginatively edited by Nancy Richardson, is that it seems to have the good-guy / bad-guy thing backwards. We know that Lymon lied, cheated and spent his women's money on drugs - in one case causing wife number two, singer Zola Taylor (Halle Berry), to lose her lovely Los Angeles home and all her savings. However, with one or two exceptions, we never really see him being anything other than adorable.

On screen Lymon gets to say such endearing niceties as "I love you" and "Let's get married." He gets to tell the women how fine they look and how much he wants to take care of them. When it comes to ruining their lives, however, most of the horror is told in flashback, as if it were just a rumor. On the other hand, the women who were victimized by him are shown on screen to be greedy, mendacious, scheming and unscrupulous as they lie under oath and plot to take Lymon's royalties from each other. I wonder why a movie that is about a terrible guy would spend so much energy on vilifying the women he was terrible to.

Movie Review "Why Do Fools Fall in Love'

* CAST Halle Berry, Vivica A. Fox, Lela Rochon, Larenz Tate

* DIRECTOR Gregory Nava

* WRITER Tina Andrews


* THEATERS Kabuki, AMC 1000, Stonestown

* EVALUATION **1/4&lt;