To her friends and neighbors, she’s Linda Susan Boreman (Amanda Seyfried, a saucer-eyed cipher), freckle-faced daughter of a religious mother (Sharon Stone) and blue-collar father (Robert Patrick). But after she meets the sleazily alluring Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), this shy young woman embarks on a sordid path to the spotlight. You know her name: Linda Lovelace. And you know the hard-core film Deep Throat (1972), which catapulted her to stardom and briefly took pornography mainstream.

Of course there’s much more to the story than a lady untangling her tingle: Deep Throat was not-so-quietly financed by the mob, Traynor physically and emotionally abused Lovelace, and she soon left her peep-show career to reinvent herself as an antipornography feminist. But don’t look to this skin-deep biopic to offer any insights beyond the head-slappingly superficial. Directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Howl) treat Lovelace like a goody-goody martyr sacrificed on the altar of smut (“You made me look beautiful,” she coos to a creepy shutterbug) and revel in sex-negative, little-girl-lost sentimentality throughout. The only (unintentional) pleasure comes from anticipating which scale-paid celebrity will pop up next in a minor role: Adam Brody as scene partner Harry Reems! James Franco as Hugh Hefner! Chloë Sevigny as…Random Reporter Girl! Hey, you get your bliss where you can find it.

Follow Keith Uhlich on Twitter: @keithuhlich