For audiences of a certain age, the name Tammy Faye Bakker is a metonym for any number of women in the 1980s and 1990s who became famous for a particular brand of gilded excess and gobsmacking lack of self-awareness: Along with Imelda Marcos, Leona Helmsley and Ivana Trump, Bakker — who with her husband, Jim, became wealthy as hugely popular televangelists — came packaged as a ready-made cartoon. Affecting the exaggerated power-suit shoulder pads of the era, her face spackled with layers of makeup and false eyelashes, Bakker became all the more of a tabloid piñata when the empire she built with Jim was destroyed amid his sexual and financial misdeeds. It's that Tammy Faye Bakker — the spangled laughingstock who embodied hypocrisy at its most flagrant — whom we meet right away in "The Eyes of Tammy Faye." Filmed in close-up, regarding herself in a mirror while an unseen makeup assistant tries to remove her eyeliner and lip liner, she says it's no use. They're permanent. "This is who I am," she chirps — cheerfully? Resignedly? A little of both. Adapted from Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato's 2000 documentary of the same name, "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" stars Jessica Chastain in a freewheeling and affectionate biopic, in which we meet the young Tammy Faye as a girl in Minnesota, trying desperately to win the love and approval of her icily withholding mother (Cherry Jones at her most tight-lipped imposing). After meeting and falling in love with Jim (Andrew Garfield) at Bible college, the two embark on an itinerant life of spreading the Good News, primarily through puppet shows for kids. While on the road, they get the attention of such evangelical power brokers as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and they create the Praise the Lord (PTL) Satellite Network, which will eventually reach tens of millions of people in more than 50 countries with a form of "prosperity gospel" that entails near-constant entreaties for money. The Bakkers' rise and fall is a colorful, almost surreally metaphorical ride, and Tammy Faye, who died in 2007 after divorcing Jim and marrying her ex-husband's business associate Roe Messner, is the perfect figure to recruit viewers' rooting interest: As in Bailey and Barbato's film, here she is portrayed as a flawed but deeply sympathetic figure trying to navigate the patriarchal strictures of a rapidly politicizing evangelical hierarchy.