What to do when your career has been blown up by sexual-misconduct scandal? Strategies differ. You could deny and claim the real enemy is the NRA (Harvey Weinstein). Or vaguely admit wrongdoing, apologize, hope everything blows over but then moan about being railroaded when it doesn’t (Al Franken). You could disappear (Matt Lauer). Or disappear for a while but then go back to work (Louis CK, Aziz Ansari).

The most entertaining response, though, has been Kevin Spacey’s. No apology tour for him. No hair shirts either. No, he’s making his exile into a piece of open-ended performance art. I’m not sure it’ll work, but bless him for trying. He’s an entertainer, after all, and his combination of Machiavellian defiance and self-pity is giving us all a giggle. The Kevin Spacey Show is better than “American Beauty,” at any rate.

Spacey’s latest stunt was to pop up in Rome, which is in Europe, which, the last time I checked, is a place where pretty much any American idea about what constitutes a sex scandal is going to earn you a shrug and a “So what?” Which is why Roman Polanski is having such a nice time there.

At the National Roman Museum, Spacey gave his first live public performance since the scandal broke two years ago, reading the poem “The Boxer,” by Italy’s Gabriele Tinti next to a sculpture entitled “Boxer at Rest.” Whatever could have attracted him to the work? Possibly it was lines like, “I shook the country, made the arenas vibrate, tore my opponents to shreds. I lit up the darkness, collected insults, compelled applause. Not everyone knew how to do this. None of you.”

I didn’t say it was a good poem. It sounds like the chest-pounding pre-fight script written for a World Wrestling Entertainment star with a name like Gigonzo to growl when he’s marching to the ring.

“The Boxer” also includes these lines: “The more you’re wounded, the greater you are. And the more empty you are. They used me for their entertainment, fed on shoddy stuff. Life was over in a moment.”

By “used me,” I think Spacey means “paid me extraordinarily well despite my looking like the assistant manager of a Denny’s and also gave me two Oscars.” As for “wounded,” you don’t earn victim status because you acquired scars from punching yourself in the face. Spacey’s troubles are entirely of his own doing. He is being investigated on six separate cases of alleged sexual assault in the UK, though a case against him in Massachusetts was dropped when a witness who accused the actor of groping him in a bar in 2016 stopped answering questions.

The Rome performance followed Spacey’s now-legendary YouTube video in which, in character as the sinister pol Frank Underwood from “House of Cards,” he tried to lump in the allegations of rotten behavior in real life with his amusing TV villainy. “Of course, some believed everything and have just been waiting with bated breath to hear me confess it all,” he said in the video. “They’re just dying to have me declare that everything said is true and that I got what I deserved. Wouldn’t that be easy if it was all so simple? Only you and I both know it’s not that simple, not in politics and not in life.”

Bonkers! But at least Krazy Kevin beats Cryin’ Al Franken, who according to a carefully controlled attempt at image rehabilitation in The New Yorker, spends his days bewailing the injustice of being caught groping multiple women by staying in his house with the shades drawn in a “man cave where someone hides out from the world,” according to his flack/profiler Jane Mayer.

Spacey has realized something other accused men haven’t: You no longer need a movie studio or a TV station as a go-between if you want to keep doing your shtick for the world. I hope he finds some better writing, but I look forward to his next hilariously self-serving appearance.

Kyle Smith is critic-at-large for National Review.