Rules Don't Apply (Warren Beatty, 2016)

Despite planning a Howard Hughes biopic as far back as the 1970s, the Warren Beatty of 2016 was clearly drawn to the subject due to Hughes' compulsion to shroud himself in darkness. It proved the perfect Vaseline lens for the late-70s Beatty and it casts a grotesquely self-absorbed pall over the film. So does the fact that the film won the 2016 Alliance of Women Film Journalists EDA award for Most Egregious Age Difference Between The Lead and The Love Interest - 52 years between Beatty and Lily Collins. But as someone who hasn't lived in the spotlight, who am I to judge? And what better way to depict a grody figure like Hughes than via grotesquerie? What's most astonishing about Rules Don't Apply is how young and sprightly it feels. The thing never sits stills with a manic torrent of dialogue pummeling the viewer-auditor throughout. Period songs are clipped off in the middle. Fleet and airy, the editing partakes in the current vogue for intensified continuity. It's all in the service of portraying a world passing Beatty/Hughes by as he cedes much of the narrative and the requisite formation of the heterosexual couple/nuclear family to Collins and young-Beatty doppelgnger Aiden Ehrenreich. Maybe the film isn't so self-aborbed after all.

Grade: A-minus