Bette Davis titled her autobiography “The Lonely Life,” but a new film about the inscrutable actress suggests a very crowded existence—friends, enemies, fans, husbands, lovers and betes noires, many driven away when they started getting too close.

Sometimes, those who do the most brilliant jobs at imitating life are the lousiest at actually living it.

“Stardust: The Bette Davis Story,” premiering tonight at 8 ET on Turner Classic Movies, is one of the most personal, intimate and shocking biographical documentaries ever made about a movie star. One of the conclusions to be drawn from it—not a new idea, but one that is eloquently restated—is that talent can be a hideous blessing, a glorious curse, and it can make someone a pain in the neck to everybody within shouting distance.

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Filmmaker Peter Jones and his colleagues found a wealth of material about Davis, whose very existence was a performance—and who appears to have loved nothing more than a good fight. “Stardust” recalls the legendary struggles as told by those who knew and worked with (and sometimes loathed) Davis, an attempt to put all the jigsaw pieces together and figure her out in a riveting and intense 90 minutes.

Among the most famous of her battles, of course, was a long-running struggle with Jack L. Warner, head of production at Warner Bros., where Davis spent 18 years and made most of her greatest films. Balking at having been offered a terrible role in what looked to be an awful movie, Davis refused to work, and Warner suspended her to show her who was boss. But Davis never liked having bosses and figured she knew more about movie acting than any of them did.

Her epitaph, engraved on the family crypt, was appropriately blunt: “She did it the hard way.”

Family contradictions
The star’s mother, Ruthie, seemed to know that her daughter was headed for great acclaim and accomplishment. In archival interviews, Bette Davis describes her mother in seemingly contradictory ways. “Mother believed in compliments,” she says in one interview. In another, though, she recalls Ruthie scolding her for being too thrilled over the rave reviews she got in a 1929 production of “The Wild Duck.”

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“You can’t allow yourself to enjoy it that much,” her mother lectured her, almost as if warning her that happiness equals complacency. Her father, meanwhile, showed her a skyful of stars when she was young and told her how insignificant she was in the firmament. (The documentary is not called “Stardust” for that reason. “Stardust” was also Davis’s favorite song, which begins with one of the greatest verses of all time: “And now the purple dusk of twilight time steals across the meadows of my heart.”

In interview clips, Davis says her father was not a nice person and that “I was delighted” when her parents divorced. It was a blessing to her mother, Davis says: “I really felt happy for her and for all of us.”

CONTINUED : Making 'Mommie Dearest' look wholesome

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