To understand why Jackson Pollock is such a pivotal figure in American culture, and why his art seemed so radical fifty years ago, a little historical background is useful.

In late 1941, when Lee Krasner (played by Marcia Gay Harden) first visited Pollock's studio, New York had not yet become the international art capital it is today. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, with the economy in shambles and nationwide unemployment at 25%, the city's artists had almost no market for their work. Many of them, Pollock and Krasner included, earned their living on government "work-fare" programs, the most famous of which is the WPA Federal Art Project. With a weekly paycheck from Uncle Sam, artists were free to paint in whatever style they liked, from the "American Scene" Regionalism of Pollock's teacher, Thomas Hart Benton, to pure formalism inspired by Mondrian and Kandinsky. Arshile Gorky, one of the most respected abstract painters, created a mural for Newark Airport, and Willem de Kooning (played by Val Kilmer)-who later became Pollock's rival for the title of Abstract Expressionism's leader-designed a wall painting for a Brooklyn housing project. But compared to the European masters of modernism, whose work was regularly shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), American abstractionists were considered mere provincial followers. Major exhibitions of Picasso, Matisse and others made it clear, to paraphrase Pollock, that those guys had gotten there first.

With the rise of World War II, however, the situation began to change. Many of Europe's foremost artists were forced to flee Nazi-dominated countries, where Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism were labeled "degenerate" and officially banned. A large contingent of exiled Europeans-among them Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Leger, Joan Miro and Piet Mondrian-spent the war years in New York, where their ideas stimulated the young American vanguard. Hans Hofrnann, a German emigre and influential teacher, brought over his first-hand experience with Cubism and Expressionism and passed it along to his American students, including Krasner. The Surrealists, with their theories about spontaneous creativity and art arising in dreams and the unconscious mind, had a powerful impact on those who, like Pollock, were struggling to develop an original style.

The heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim, Solomon's niece (played by Amy Madigan) also established a crucial link between the American and European art worlds. As an expatriate living in high bohemian style abroad, she had bought avant-garde art and supported avant-garde artists. When the war forced her to return to her native New York, she opened a gallery, Art of This Century, that quickly became a sensation. But in addition to showing the abstract and Surrealist works she had imported from Europe, she set out to discover the domestic equivalents. By mixing the work of virtually unknown Americans with that of established Europeans, Guggenheim helped legitimize several artists who would soon form the nucleus of the New York School. Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and William Baziotes (played by artist Kenny Scharf) all had their first one-person exhibitions at Art of This Century, and many of their colleagues were included in group shows there.

By the time Guggenheim closed her gallery and returned to Europe in 1947, New York had replaced Paris as the modern art mecca. America's post-war economic superiority unquestionably played a crucial role in that transition, but it could not have happened without the artistic innovations that placed America at the forefront of international modernism. Pollock's radical breakthrough to his controversial "drip" technique heralded an art of pure, unmediated expression that seemed both novel and quintessentially American. French, German and Italian critics argued over its merits, but could not ignore its vitality and originality.

Pollock was the first American abstract painter to be taken seriously in Europe, where Guggenheim exhibited his work from her collection. His decisive contribution was to produce imagery that did not simply rehash European precedents. Even in the early 1940s, synthesizing influences from such diverse sources as Mexican murals, Native American pictographs and universal archetypes identified by the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, combined with modernism's rejection of literal representation, Pollock was already exploring new territory. His originality was recognized by astute colleagues, notably Krasner, a shrewd judge of modern painting who was thoroughly familiar with the latest international trends, and by Clement Greenberg (played by Jeffrey Tambor), just beginning his career as an art critic when he encountered Pollock's work at Art of This Century.

Greenberg's forceful opinions inspired Life magazine's 1949 feature article-its first on an abstract artist-which made Pollock the most celebrated painter of his generation. With a circulation of more than 5 million, Life gave Pollock unprecedented exposure. Not until Andy Warhol in the 1960s would another American artist receive so much attention in the popular press. Meanwhile, both the audience and the market for what had become known as Abstract Expressionism were expanding, and other artists were competing with Pollock for the movement's premier position. These pressures took their toll on his fragile psyche and, in a social environment where excessive drinking was the rule, contributed to his decline after 1950. Within five years he had stopped painting altogether, and his comfortable annual income of around $10,000 was coming from the sale of old work. He had alienated Krasner and many of his former friends and supporters, and lost his lifelong battle with the bottle.

The tragic figure we see in Ed Harris' masterful portrait is, paradoxically, the classic culture hero of postwar America. Brash, uncompromising, masking sensitivity with aggression, Pollock has been likened to James Dean and Marion Brando. But his art transcended the limitations of his flawed, self-destructive personality. Like the jazz music he loved, Pollock fused structure and spontaneity, discipline and freedom to create a unique form of expression that perfectly captures the energy of its era.