‘Law & Order’ star investigates her own family’s tragic car crash in ‘My Mom Jayne’

At the very start of My Mom Jayne, producer and director Mariska Hargitay lays out the basic facts, as she knows them, about her parents, siblings and early childhood.

Hargitay has only the vaguest memories of her mother, Jayne Mansfield, the sex-symbol movie star who died in a 1967 car crash, at age 34, when Hargitay, one of her mother’s five children, was only 3. Hargitay was raised by her father, who also was a celebrity of the 1950s: He was Mickey Hargitay, a former Mister Universe … and the only parent young Mariska ever really knew.

One method Hargitay uses to unlock her family secrets is to do the research she had previously avoided. She reads celebrity tell-all biographies and magazine articles, and collects as many of the existing TV and movie appearances, and recorded interviews, as she can.

Mansfield was raised in Texas, played classical piano and violin and spoke several languages. She married young, and persuaded her then-husband to move with her to Los Angeles, to pursue her dream of a career in show business. He didn’t last long, and neither did their marriage. But Mansfield persisted — though her plans for being a serious actor were affected by the way some people responded to her looks, and especially to her very curvy figure.

In 1955, when she was only 22 years old, Mansfield became a Broadway sensation as the scene-stealing co-star of the comedy Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Movie roles followed quickly: first as the sexy star of the early rock-and-roll film The Girl Can’t Help It, which also featured Little Richard and Fats Domino, then in the movie version of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Also in that film was Groucho Marx, who later welcomed Mansfield to his TV show, Tell It to Groucho. By that time, she was trying to shake her sex-symbol image — though even her strongest supporters couldn’t resist perpetuating it.

My Mom Jayne is equally thorough about looking into Mickey Hargitay’s past, and how he and Mansfield met and fell in love. But after delving deeply into the public record of films, TV clips and vintage interviews, Mariska Hargitay takes an even deeper dive into the private record. She interviews her brothers and sisters, who share detailed memories with her for the first time — and who are invaluable contributors as both sources and on-camera supporting characters.

Hargitay also examines the vast contents of a family storage locker that had remained unopened since 1969. And like the determined detective she’s played on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit since 1999, Hargitay follows the clues wherever they lead. Those clues include faces cut out of family photographs, and stories about that fatal car crash — which, it turns out, was survived by the children in the car, including young Mariska. By the end of this documentary, the information she’s uncovered upends and rewrites much of what Hargitay knew about her parents, and herself.

The first half of My Mom Jayne is a somewhat standard well-done biography, but the second half shifts into a wild, emotional mystery story. Eventually, there’s a lot of hugging, and a lot of closure … and every bit of it is arrived at honestly. As a first-time documentary filmmaker, Hargitay has done something special here. But as a daughter, telling the unvarnished truth about her parents, she’s done something even more impressive.