Frankie and Alice

Halle Berry plays a stripper with a multiple personality disorder. OK, now that you’ve had a minute, the rest of Frankie and Alice isn’t quite as alluring with its melodramatic treatment of a true-life story.

It was filmed almost five years ago, and now for some reason is being rescued from the direct-to-DVD scrap heap for a theatrical release that provides Berry with a diva showcase for plenty of over-the-top emotional outbursts and violent tantrums.

She plays both of the title characters, most notably Frankie, a go-go dancer at a Los Angeles club in the early 1970s. We learn that she’s highly intelligent but deeply troubled when two alter-egos ­— a racist white matriarch from the Deep South and a timid pre-teen child — interrupt her life and land her in a psychiatric hospital.

There she is diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder, but it’s up to an eccentric doctor (Stellan Skarsgard) to pinpoint the source of Frankie’s torment, which he attempts through techniques ranging from hypnosis to the Rorschach test. Could the voices in her head be caused by residual childhood trauma, haunting memories of abuse, or something else?

The campy script, which is credited to six screenwriters, tries to take itself seriously, and probably thinks it is saying something meaningful about mental illness. Instead, it lacks much of a sense of humor, meaning most of the laughs will be unintentional.

Under the direction of British television veteran Geoffrey Sax (White Noise), the period re-creation is adequate. Yet the film skews too heavily toward sentimentality with its overbearing jazz score and clumsy attempts to manipulate sympathy for Frankie’s plight.

It provides a personal acting workshop for Berry, an Oscar winner whose starring roles have been sporadic in recent years, as she toys with accents and mannerisms. But she can’t match the more subtle work done under similar circumstances by Sally Field in Sybil or Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve.

Instead, Frankie and Alice might be a better fit for a less discriminating audience on the small screen, where viewers might not be so eager to snicker at its transparent attempt to bring its star another statuette.

Rated R, 101 minutes.