l.a. confidential; Starring Ben Affleck as the original Superman, Hollywoodland is a film noir look at the price of celebrity.(Movie review)

Fame is a fickle food," wrote Emily Dickinson, "upon a shifting plate." Nowhere does the plate shift faster than in Holly_wood, where stars appear and vanish at the speed of fireflies. The evanescence of celebrity lies at the heart of Hollywoodland, an enjoyable crime tale based on a real-life tabloid sensation: the mysterious death of George Reeves, the sturdy-jawed actor who exploded into fame as TV's Superman and just as quickly flamed out.

The story begins in 1959 L.A., when Reeves, played by a slightly pudged-up Ben Affleck, is found dead of a bullet wound in his Benedict Canyon home. Everybody is eager to write it off as an ironic suicide-"Superman Kills Himself"-but Reeves's mother doesn't buy it. To rescue her son's reputation, she hires Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), a cynical small-time private eye who normally makes his money tailing wayward spouses. As Simo digs into what happened that fateful night, the movie flashes back to scenes from Reeves's life. We see how this struggling actor finds himself kept by Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), the wife of an MGM exec (Bob Hoskins), and how he stumbles into playing the Man of Steel, a gig he found mortifying, even though it briefly made him a household name. The question is simple: Did Reeves really shoot himself, or was he murdered-by his brassy fiancee (a superb Robin Tunney), the jealous Toni, or even her husband, who seems as much a gangster as a studio boss?

With its noirish aura and Tinseltown milieu, Hollywoodland aspires to the great tradition of Sunset Boulevard and Chinatown, two classics that explored the dark shadows cast by the sun-dazzled sprawl of Los Angeles. Oddly, what holds it back is what's supposed to pull us in: the mystery. By now we've all seen so many private-eye movies that Simo's efforts to solve the Reeves case feel pro forma. It's a thin role, and Brody, who's become something of a poser since winning his Oscar for The Pianist, doesn't flesh Simo out. He's so busy preening for the camera that we never believe him as an amoral, fast-talking L.A. detective.

While first-time director Allen Coulter (late of The Sopranos) appears a tad bored by the detective story, he's clearly jazzed by fifties Hollywood. The movie takes wing whenever Reeves comes on-screen, whether he's dealing with his long-suffering agent (an excellent Jeffrey DeMunn), taking an on-set pratfall while trying to "fly" faster than a speeding bullet, or pursuing his mercenary (but not heartless) affair with Toni Mannix, elegantly played by Lane, one of our most underrated actresses, and ...