As clumsily constructed as its title, Hollywoodland drags its slow length back and forth between a pair of narrative lines, one based on a true story (kind of), the other concocted out of two young filmmakers' memories of Chinatown.

The first line, which runs through a decade's events, concerns the life of actor George Reeves: his love affair with Toni Mannix, wife of MGM general manager Eddie Mannix; his unexpected and humiliating success, playing Superman on television; and his sudden death, apparently by his own hand, in 1959. The film's second line, which begins immediately after Reeves's death, concerns a fictitious private investigator named Louis Simo, who lives and works out of a cheap motel room, employs his girlfriend as a secretary and dines off of other people's plates at coffee shops. Like better movie gumshoes before him, Simo is sure to have his nose flattened and conscience aroused by the end of the picture. The occasion for both: his snooping into the possibility that Reeves was murdered.

I was 8 years old when Superman died, and as devoted a fan as Reeves ever had; so if there's a larger meaning to be had from this story, I was ready to receive it. And yet, watching Hollywoodland, I kept asking: What is the point? If this film is an exercise in style, then I think first-time screenwriter Paul Bernbaum does not yet know how to cut back and forth with any grace, nor does first-time director Allen Coulter (a veteran of episodic television) yet know how to tell a story that runs longer than an hour. If the film is an opportunity for the actors to shine, then I think Adrien Brody can furrow his forehead and pull down his eyebrows with as much wiseass sensitivity as anyone since James Dean, but he can't do much else with Simo's character as written. I also worry that Ben Affleck, impersonating an actor who found his natural level as Superman, may suffer from having found his own natural level as George Reeves.

Is the point, then, the old, reliable one, that Hollywoodland is Tinseltown? No again. The film does give you a dose of the hypocrisy and corruption, the quick money and easy sex, that are so intrinsic to legends of Los Angeles (not to mention New York, Washington, Chicago and Peyton Place). Yet Hollywoodland ultimately focuses not on excesses but on limits. Reeves must understand that he will never have a great career; and Simo must see that he isn't a beatnik Mike Hammer, and so ought to put on a white shirt and tie and take care of his son.

The characters are disappointed men. The movie, like them, is a well-meaning mediocrity.

* * *

Because it will be impossible in many places for Kirby Dick to advertise his new documentary, to book it into theaters or to dump it into bins as a DVD, I feel I ought to promote the picture. So: Please make an effort to see This Film Is Not Yet Rated, a very funny, frequently infuriating, and (of course) unrated exposé of the film rating board of the Motion Picture Association of America.

If you follow the movies at all, you will know that MPAA is the lobbying organization for the six major studios, which are now units of companies that control some 90 percent of the media in the United States. In 1968 the organization instituted its ratings system so that "people could make decisions about...what movies were appropriate for their children." (This, in MPAA's own language.) Ratings are given by an in-house board that operates anonymously and is notorious for its biases: It is lenient toward violence and studio productions, stringent toward sex and independent productions and noticeably squeamish about homosexuality. Filmmakers are free to disregard this secret group of big-media representatives, but the costs of noncompliance are high (see above).

This is real Hollywood corruption. And Kirby Dick blows the lid off of it with the help of a real Hollywood private eye, who happens to be a nice, middle-aged lesbian mom. You will laugh; you will growl. And you will learn what MPAA doesn't want you to know: the names.

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