Phil Spector: TV movie

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9 p.m. Sunday, HBO

The question of whether famed music producer Phil Spector killed struggling actress Lana Clarkson is secondary in HBO’s “Phil Spector.” The film, written and directed by David Mamet, is only about a murder trial the way “Glengarry Glen Ross” is only about real estate.

Mamet is on his game in “Phil Spector,” airing Sunday night, but so is every member of his cast, including Al Pacino as Spector and Helen Mirren as attorney Linda Kenney Baden. One of the reasons “Phil Spector” is so engaging is the chance to watch these two acting titans work to the full extent of their powers.

HBO insists the film is not a dramatization of Spector’s first trial for the 2003 death of actress Lana Clarkson, but rather, that actual events and people “inspired” the film.

That’s Mamet’s way of buying a permissive license to interpret and, frankly, to create characterizations that explore much more than whether Clarkson put a gun in her mouth that night at Spector’s home and pulled the trigger, or whether Spector did the deed.

Suffering from an ever-worsening cold, Kenney Baden arrives at the sparsely furnished temporary offices set up in Los Angeles by attorney Bruce Cutler (Jeffrey Tambor) as defense headquarters for Spector’s first trial. At best, she thinks Spector’s crazy but tries to remain agnostic about his guilt or innocence. Summoned to Spector’s house, she goes alone in the rain through the barbed-wire gates and into a labyrinth of rooms and hallways. Each overstuffed room seems to have a theme – one room is devoted to Lincoln memorabilia, another set up like a carnival with an assortment of swords and knives, yet another contains a jail cell and a wall decorated with silhouettes of the guns removed by the cops after Clarkson’s death.

Finally, she finds herself at three doors. The left one opens inward, the right one opens outward, and the one in the middle may be trompe l’oeil. The place is a cross between a haunted mansion and a set designed by Magritte.

Mirren’s walk through the partially lighted rooms represents the film’s thematic descent into Spector’s mind. Whatever she thinks about him at the beginning will change as she goes deeper into what makes him tick.

As Mirren’s character moves from room to room, we anticipate the moment when she and Pacino will be in the same scene together. When it happens, it’s almost comic at first, this small, doddering and rambling man with a blond wig, seeming at first to confirm that he’s clearly a nut case who must have killed Clarkson.

Kenney Baden assesses how to get the jury to find Spector something other than a freak. With Cutler often away to work on other cases, Kenney Baden assumes more and more control of the defense, trying to find a plausible alternative scenario for the night of Clarkson’s death.

Although Mamet structures “Phil Spector” like a legal thriller, with the look and feel of Raymond Chandler, the film isn’t about guilt or innocence. As Kenney Baden tries to find a way to get a jury to like the bewigged creator of the fabled Wall of Sound, we are forced to reconsider whatever opinions we might have about Spector’s culpability. Our minds have been opened by Mamet’s deeper purpose of exploring the nature of prejudice and superficial opinions based on minimal information.

The more we get to know Pacino’s Spector, the more transparent his braggadocio becomes. He almost sounds desperate when he bellows, “I invented the music business.”