A one-man spectacle, “Barrymore” doesn’t involve that blond charmer, Drew, she of the sunburst smiles and a production company called Flower Films to go with it. No, this Barrymore is her paternal grandfather, John (1882-1942), a theater star turned silent-screen Great Profile turned — depending on who tells the tale — legend, boozy washout or self-defeating tragedy.

It took John a while to find his way in movies, and one of his earliest successes is the 1920 version of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” for which he metamorphosed from man to monster with minimal makeup, a threatening chin and crazy eyes. Films like “Grand Hotel,” “Dinner at Eight” and “Twentieth Century” followed.

Jekyll and Hyde seems an apt metaphor for an actor whose catastrophic transformation was written on a body and face that were as softened — pummeled really — by alcohol as by time. That wreckage is at center stage in “Barrymore,” Érik Canuel’s screen version of the William Luce play.

The conceit of the drama that Christopher Plummer first performed at the Stratford Festival in Canada in 1996 — it moved to Broadway the next year — is an imagined Barrymore comeback. The time is 1942, right before his death, and he is struggling to stage “Richard III,” his first Shakespearean triumph. He is a physical wreck, though he puts on a surprisingly good and vigorous show as, without an audience, he staggers about a stage delivering songs, limericks, innuendoes and reminiscences.

Barrymore’s memory sometimes fails him, but the words never do, or rather he never fails them: he grabs at their prose and poetry with force, flinging away some, caressing others. The words, drawn from his biography and some of his roles, are fine and even better when Shakespeare is the author. Plummer stumbles beautifully, poignantly and often, leering and searching through a haze of memory or, with concern edged with panic, calling for “a line, a line” much as Richard III calls for a horse. From smile to sneer he captures Barrymore’s majesty and grandiloquence, recites his triumphs and humiliations.