Hollywoodland (2006)

Back in the 1950s, when lumpy could pass for hunky, George Reeves was the Man of Steel. Planting fists on hips clad in a man-girdle over tights, sucking in sixpackless abs, and letting wind machines flutter the kind of beach-towel cape that made The Incredibles' Edna Mode ban those garments from her couture collection, the amateur boxer-turned actor wowed the pint-size TV-watching audience of The Adventures of Superman with his pursuit of truth, justice, and the American way, and became one of the young medium's first superstars. He also became one of the first to be tripped up by his own TV-size celebrity: Not only was he stereotyped at the expense of further movie-role opportunities but he was also entangled in a very public, long-term affair with Toni Mannix, the jealous wife of an MGM studio exec with gangster connections. (The Mannixes had a marital understanding; if she was extracurricularly happy, he was happy.) In desperation, an unemployed Reeves was considering a turn to exhibition wrestling when he died in 1959, in his bedroom, of wounds from a speeding bullet. He was 45 years old. Although ruled a suicide at the time, there has never been definite proof as to who pulled the trigger: Was it a despondent Reeves himself? A thug dispatched on behalf of Edgar Mannix? Or was it maybe Leonore Lemmon, the ambitious young socialite for whom Reeves had left a distraught, older Mrs. M?

The elegant biodrama Hollywoodland presents all options in its meditation on the price of the American way of fame, a toll exacted even back when ''land'' still completed the letters of the sign famously visible from high in the Hollywood Hills. But a bit too daintily, the pic also sides with none of them, as if ''all of the above'' is the safe answer to the mystery. The chief frustration of this otherwise well-made, well-acted, well-heeled picture — a movie classy in its artful modesty, with every detail of plot and period furnishings lovingly conceived, every lick of jazz-influenced score true to the times — is that it is so very self-absorbedly graceful about something so very insular and...unremarkable. Intertwining the dissatisfactions of Reeves (Ben Affleck) with the compromises of Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), the fly-by-night detective hired by the actor's mother to look further into who might have shot her famous son, writer Paul Bernbaum (in his first produced feature screenplay) and Sopranos director Allen Coulter (also making his feature debut) clearly aim to double the weight of Tinseltown soullessness by adding together the self-delusions of both men; instead the filmmakers detract from the puny, innocence-busting sadness of Reeves' unique TV-tinsel story, so that Hollywoodland becomes just another L.A. confidential about Sunset Boulevard, about gods and monsters, and the way most men share DNA with Clark Kent, not Superman.

On the other hand, no false refinement obscures the gusto with which the cast chomp down on their tasty roles: Brody slithering and prowling, Diane Lane willing her sensual beauty to weariness as Toni Mannix, Bob Hoskins snarling and potent as her husband, Robin Tunney brandishing the pout of a bored wannabe as Leonore, and all of them enhancing Affleck — hungriest of all — as Reeves. There's something simultaneously heartfelt, wised-up, playful, and fierce about the way the onetime Daredevil acknowledges that he knows that we know that he knows that we're bound to read something of the actor's own skids with fame in his expiatory portrayal of a star who couldn't quite steer his own image.

The Society for the Rehabilitation of Thespian Reputations would be proud of Affleck as he packs himself into his Superman duds, aware of the absurdity of a grown man hauled around by wires to juvenile acclaim; when the cameras aren't rolling, his Reeves smokes and drinks like a superhero out of MAD magazine, not DC Comics. ''You can't see my penis, can you?'' he checks backstage before making a promotional appearance in full super-underpants regalia before a crowd of pip-squeaks, as telefilm-trained cinematographer Jonathan Freeman captures the savagery just behind all that visual wholesomeness. It's impossible not to be just a little bit more charmed than usual when it's Ben Affleck asking the question. Look! Up in the air! It's the likable Clark Kent of a star who survived Gigli, and whose exploits both on and off the screen have been held up to an X-ray scrutiny intense enough to burn through kryptonite.

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