All dressed up, nowhere to go

Rules Don’t Apply is Warren Beatty’s first film appearance in 15 years and his first as writer, director, producer and star since Bulworth, 19 years ago. Plenty of time, then, to figure out what he wanted to say, and how he wanted to say it, but Rules is entirely baffling. Is it a tale of Old Hollywood? Is it a biopic of Howard Hughes? Is it a love story? Unfortunately, it can never decide, so tries to be all of the above and therefore succeeds at none.

After an onscreen warning from the late Hughes himself — ‘Never check an interesting fact’ — the prologue opens in 1964, but then jumps back to 1958 as a small-town, virginal, Baptist beauty queen is flown into Hollywood as a contract actress for Hughes’s RKO studio. This is Marla, as played by Lily Collins, who may, in fact, look too modern for a Fifties starlet, and kept reminding me of Victoria Beckham. She arrives with her mother, Annette Bening who, alas, only hangs around briefly. (Come back, Annette, come back! — don’t leave me on my own with Victoria!) Marla is assigned a driver, Frank (Alden Ehrenreich, offering a pouty, brooding, James Dean-ish performance). Frank keeps being reminded that he must not fraternise with the talent — ‘Make a move on one of these chicks and you’re dead in the water’ — so I think we know where that is going to lead. As it happens, Hughes had actually sold RKO by 1958 (he sold it the General Tire and Rubber Company in 1955), which might have proved a most inconvenient fact, had anyone ever bothered to check.

OK, so Marla’s in town, awaiting a screen test, while her mother’s gone home — come back, Annette, come back! — and Frank’s trying to keep his hands off ‘the chicks’, which is hard, and they are both desperate to meet Hughes, as we are.