Action star Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a version of himself in the meta-crime-comedy JCVD. (Peace Arch Films)

It’s one kind of pain for a 47-year-old actor to lose a part to Brad Pitt, and another to lose a part to Philip Seymour Hoffman. But to lose a part to Steven Seagal, simply because Seagal had the wherewithal to cut off his ponytail? Well, that’s a metaphoric kick to the groin — and Jean-Claude Van Damme has a literal understanding of that particular agony, too.

For the last decade or so, Jean-Claude Van Damme has existed only in the DVD shadow world, shooting cheap and dirty action flicks in Asia and Eastern Europe.

A popularity rating one notch below Steven Seagal is just one of the many humiliations suffered by Jean-Claude Van Damme, the titular hero of JCVD, a meta-action-comedy that’s like an ad for career-rehabilitation boot camp: “Saved from oblivion — in one and a half hours!”

As a movie star, Van Damme’s flame flickered and died quickly — at least that’s the impression of almost anyone who doesn’t loiter in martial arts chat rooms. A Belgian karate and kickboxing champion, The Muscles from Brussels moved to the United States in the late ’80s. In a strange reversal, Van Damme helped forge the reputations of newbie, fellow-immigrant directors who were meant to make him a star, like John Woo and Tsui Hark. But for the last decade or so, Van Damme has existed only in the DVD shadow world, shooting cheap and dirty action flicks in Asia and Eastern Europe. The opening sequence of JCVD shows Van Damme — formidably fit — kicking, fighting and smashing glass in one long single shot. When the camera stops, and he wheezes in exhaustion and asks for a break, his young Asian director chastises him for thinking he’s making Citizen Kane.

He doesn’t actually have one of those on his resume yet. With the semi-exceptions of Universal Soldier and Timecop, Van Damme never delivered that one big Hollywood crossover hit, while Woo went on to acceptance in the mainstream. Once there, he cast megastar John Travolta in Face/Off, a slight that the Van Damme in JCVD mentions as a particularly cruel hit.

In fact, the JCVD character is saddened by much of life. (We’ll assume there’s some distance between the actual Van Damme and this one, though the fun is in speculating just who’s who.) He’s a hack with a bottled tan who’s just lost his daughter in a custody battle and can’t scrape together the cash to pay his circling lawyers. Taking refuge in his small, industrial hometown outside of Brussels, Van Damme stops at the post office one day and is accidentally implicated in a hold-up. So how will an action hero behave in a violent hostage-taking with the world watching? Whither the hero?

In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme inadvertently stumbles into an in-progress bank heist. (Peace Arch films)

French filmmaker Mabrouk El Mechri (a co-writer) may be winking at the predictability of all heist movies, but he also knows how to make one that’s taut and dizzying. He pads the plot with a deranged, bob-haired robber and an injured hostage, then ups the tension with the descent of a media circus. The film is choppy, loud and aggressive, but for some reason, shot through a strange metallic lens. The lacklustre tinge makes murky and dreamlike what should be an Office-like exercise in documentary — clear and verité. When Van Damme delivers a six-minute monologue about his life — drugs, divorces, disappointment — the thrill is pure voyeurism. The confession is a tweak to our shameful celebrity infatuation, and an acknowledgment of the celebrity’s driving need for our interest. Mostly, the set piece is a sympathetic reveal of a man admitting his failures as a father and a human being. The fact that he resembles the metallic-dipped woman in Goldfinger while delivering these poignant lines can only be chalked up to the director’s artsy posturing.

It’s hardly a burning question, but every once in a while, one does wonder what becomes of these kinds of temporary stars who drift in and out of the public consciousness. If he were American, could Van Damme have turned into a smug, self-mocking Bruce Willis type, or else charged forward into his own mythology like Sly Stallone?

JCVD may have nothing to do with the real JCVD, but if it does, then Van Damme seems too sensitive, too self-aware of his own carefully constructed image for the genre that created him. When one of the robbers, star-struck, asks him if he’ll perform his signature move of kicking a cigarette out of someone’s mouth, Van Damme does so with grim resignation, only because it’s expected.

There’s too much genuine pain in the performance for the film to function purely as satire. Jean Claude Van Damme plays — or is? — another man in a mid-life crisis. Only he happens to be living it in front of the whole world, or at least the few remaining fans who care.

JCVD opens in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on Nov. 14 .

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.