"The Art of Failure: Chuck Connelly Not for Sale," the title of a documentary airing on HBO, sums up the ambivalence that underlies this riches-to-rags story of a Pleasant Hills native who plummeted from 1980s art world darling to persona non grata.

Connelly, according to the film, sold more than $1 million worth of art in that heady decade. But then he fell from grace.

How much of that was the fault of the acrid-tongued artist and how much the product of an unpredictable and self-serving art world is difficult to determine from this fast-paced, 63-minute program that was filmed over six years.

Director and producer Jeff Stimmel, a native of Mt. Lebanon and a University of Pittsburgh film graduate, met Connelly at an art opening in New York and was intrigued by his story. (The film's composer is Paul A. Anderson, another Mt. Lebanon native and, like Stimmel, a 1984 graduate of Mt. Lebanon High School. The music producer is Mt. Lebanon native and Seton LaSalle graduate Riley McMahon.)

Born in 1955, Connelly attended Tyler Art School, Philadelphia, then moved to New York's East Village. It was a charged time for the art market, and the artist's neo-expressionist style fit the mood of the day. He gained representation by one of New York's most successful galleries and found moneyed patrons.

The film opens with Connelly's wife peddling her husband's work to urban galleries and receiving nothing but rejection.

So what went wrong?

Was it the fickleness of the art world, an implied gaggle of entrepreneurs treating young artists as any other commodity?

Was it behavior like Connelly's drunken dismissal of famed director Martin Scorsese's 1990 film "Life Lessons" -- part of the "New York Stories" trilogy -- that had been modeled on Connelly and in which actor Nick Nolte played the artist?

The answer is probably somewhere in the middle, within the confusion of an ambitious and talented young artist determined to step into the big time but clueless about the social niceties required to succeed and instead patterning himself on stereotype.

Connelly grew up in a home troubled with alcoholism, temper and abuse. Looking into the world of successful artists as an outsider, he admired the eccentricities of fellow Pittsburgh native Andy Warhol (in the film, Connelly visits Warhol's grave) and the naughty-boy reputations of the likes of Jackson Pollock.

One might ask why this film was made. Connelly is not the first, nor last, talented artist to receive less than warranted recognition, and it's difficult to sympathize with someone who so belligerently pursues his own demise.

Later in the documentary, with his gallery, patron and wife all gone, Connelly cooks up a bizarre scheme to try to revive interest in his work. He hires a young actor to pose as his art school alter ego and take his work to galleries. That having failed, one wonders whether Connelly agreed to participate in the film as another elaborate comeback attempt.

At the end numerous of the approximately 3,000 paintings accumulating in his Philadelphia home/studio parade before the camera. One might cynically read this as another grasp at exposure by an artist secure in the product of his brush but desperate to find the right persona to accompany it to the world.

The final scene, of Connelly collapsing onto the floor, beer in hand, as he attempts to pick up a fallen canvas, may sadly be more symbolic of his legacy than all of the paintings that preceded the film's conclusion.