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The story of Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist who became the symbol of the gross corruption of the Bush years, has already gotten documentary treatment from Alex Gibney in “Casino Jack: The United States of Money.” Now it receives a darkly satirical docu-drama one. But as much as one might like to embrace the last work of a director who died too young, George Hickenlooper’s take on the scandal is, despite some sharp moments, just too messy and uneven to hit the target consistently.

Kevin Spacey easily brings an air of smug confidence and brazen amorality to Abramoff, who’s afforded ample opportunity to voice his venal sense of self-entitlement in monologues addressed to others as well as to himself in a mirror, “Taxi Driver”-style. The script concentrates on a few of his schemes, most notably his collusion with wild-eyed partner Michael Scanlon (Barry Pepper) to fleece Indian tribes looking to protect their gambling interests and their effort to gain control over a Florida cruise-ship casino operation whose sleazy owner, Gus Boulis (Daniel Kash), is in legal trouble. In the latter operation Jack unwisely enlists as his confederate the obviously unreliable Adam Kidan (Jon Lovitz), whose penchant for bulldozing the wrong people via his mob connections will ultimately play a role in Abramoff’s downfall.

Integrated into the plot, though not very smoothly, are Jack’s enlistment of Republican congressmen Tom DeLay (Spencer Garrett) and Bob Ney (Jeff Pustil) and anti-tax operative Grover Norquist (Jeffrey Smith) in his doings, which involve not just the Indian and Florida business but a drive to maintain exemption from US labor laws for Mariana Islands sweatshop operations, a plan to build a Washington-area prep school, and even ownership of a couple of D.C. restaurants, one of them kosher.

The intent of Hickenlooper and screenwriter Norman Snider in tossing all this material into the mix is obviously to show the overweening ambition and aura of invincibility that Abramoff represented—to paint a portrait of the so-called American Dream transformed, as so often happens, into a gross nightmare. The problem is that they never manage to assemble the various strands—which also include the dichotomy between Abramoff’s Jewishness and his affiliation with Bible-thumping Christian groups and a subplot involving Kidan’s employment of an aging Mafia chieftain (the late Maury Chaykin) to deal with Boulis—into a coherent whole, or maintain a sure comic touch. The movie lurches from moment to moment almost spastically, intending, one supposes, to capture the sense that Abramoff was always skating on thin ice, juggling multiple balls in the air while staying one step ahead of the law until things came crashing down around him. The material about Jack’s wife Kelly Preston) and Scanlon’s girlfriend (Rachelle Lefevre) adds to the sense of overstuffing. The result comes across as chaotic rather than enlightening, a parable of astronomical excess that seems excessive itself.

Still, Spacey skillfully applies his patented brand of Machiavellian oiliness to Abramoff, while also managing to catch the guy’s blissful obtuseness about what he’s doing and even adding a smidgen of sympathy for the fellow in the final reel. The other cast members content themselves mostly with caricature, with Pepper in particular going for the jugular in virtually every scene, though Lovitz has undeniable fun with Kidan’s scummy operator and Graham Greene adds an air of bemused dignity to the role of an Indian leader who helps bring Abramoff down. The technical side of the picture is okay, though Matthew Davies’ design opts more for grittiness than elegance and Adam Swica’s cinematography goes along with that choice.

One can imagine that if handled more deftly, the story of Jack Abramoff could have become one of the great movies about an American scoundrel. But this “Casino” is one in which the players don’t beat the house; they don’t even come out ahead.