It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s just Ben Affleck in a lumpy blue Superman costume from studio wardrobe. O.K., the image is silly and appetite-curbing, even in color, but in Hollywoodland, a fascinating, intelligent and probing new film noir about the unsolved Tinseltown mystery surrounding the death of actor George Reeves, it’s supposed to be. And damn if the almost-always-ineffectual poster boy for stardom without craft doesn’t work so hard that he makes the embarrassment and humiliation of a Hollywood failure doubly tragic. For cynics like me, his shadowboxing, overweight, sad-eyed, zits-and-all performance as the doomed George Reeves is nothing less than astonishingly real.

 

Like Macbeth, Superman may be a role that is always jinxed. (See Christopher Reeve.) But the downfall and lurid death of George Reeves, who to millions of kids growing up in the 1950’s was an action-hero comic-book icon, was creepy even by Hollywood standards, forever tainted by a special kind of tabloid poison. After playing one of Scarlett O’Hara’s suitors in Gone with the Wind, the promising career he banked on never ignited. And after changing from mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent into the corny caped crusader from Krypton in thousands of convenient phone booths in 104 cheesy episodes of the Superman TV show, Reeves was depressed, disillusioned and down for the count. One June night in 1959, his naked body was found dead of a single gunshot wound in the upstairs bedroom of his Hollywood home, a Hollywood has-been at 45. It went down as an apparent suicide, but many criminal theories have been floating around for nearly 50 years, and this impressively researched movie explores them all.

 

Like parallel lines, director Allen Coulter (The Sopranos) and writer Paul Bernbaum blend the facts of Reeves’ life with the investigation of a fictional gumshoe named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) and find enough illuminating similarities to make a film that sizzles like bacon in a hot skillet. On the TV screen, Reeves was a big, overgrown Boy Scout, coming out of his bulging tights in all the wrong places, working for truth, justice and the American Way in black and white. In reality, he was not loyal, trustworthy, brave, helpful, courteous, kind, obedient, thrifty or a straight shooter. He was broken, troubled, sleazy and desperate—not a player, not even close enough to the Hollywood action to be an observer.

 

Simo, as tough as Bogart, is a deadbeat dad working out of a seedy motel room, feeding off the scraps that respectable cops wouldn’t touch. When Reeves’ mother (Lois Smith) refuses to believe her son was a suicide, Simo smells a murder case that will make him a star. And there is evidence that he might be onto something. The real detective, Jerry Geisler, died before he could prove anything, but the movie doesn’t hide from name-dropping. Among the suspects: Reeves’ jealous longtime lover, Toni Mannix (Diane Lane, luscious even with bags and dewlaps); her dangerous husband, Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins), ex-mobster and MGM executive; Reeves’ fiancée, Lenore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), who was inside the house when the gun went off; and tough MGM publicist Howard Strickling (Joe Spano), who “fixed” every scandal in town for a price. With so many colorful suspects, variable motives, contradictory clues, and period sets and costumes dripping with florid 50’s details, the setup for a perfect crime thriller is guaranteed. With Rita Hayworth dancing at Ciro’s and the Saturday-afternoon cowboy serials so cheap that everyone on the set rode the same horse, Hollywoodland evokes some of the same scuzzy glamour as L.A. Confidential.

 

In the end, the struggling actor, flying through the air in his Superman tights but getting nowhere, and the seedy investigator, hungry for publicity, money and self-respect while digging his own grave, merge into one hopeless footnote to Hollywood infamy. A terrific cast pumps suspense into the nervous system of this movie like adrenalin. No one is what he seems. Even the mother has a hidden agenda, pretending to preserve George’s integrity but driven by greed to hold onto the spillover from his klieg light as long as she can. The whole movie is a dour comment on the dark side of make-believe.