Director Damien Chazelle brings to the screen a three-hour and nine minute film depicting a pivotal and interesting time in movie history: the difficult transition from silent films to "talkies."
The problem is that, despite a star studded cast, the film puts vulgar sensationalism above all else, including a complete lack of plot structure and emotional resonance. In what is clearly meant to be both a love letter and expose of 1920s Hollywood instead comes across as a vulgar, plotless jumble of scenes that don't fit together very well.
Brad Pitt is the fitional Jack Conrad, a wildly successful silent film actor whose career is in rapid decline. He takes a young Mexican man, Manny Torres, played well by Diego Calva, under his wing, and he moves quickly into the film industry, which is in its infancy in the early 1920s.
Conrad and Torres first meet at a wild, debauched Hollywood party in the mid 1920s. There, they both meet Nellie La Roy, played by Margot Robbie, who is a wanna-be actress who crashes the party and also quickly crashes into the movie industry.
The party sets the tone for the film, featuring sexual debauchery and drug use. I always notice incongruities in period pieces, and the entire crowd at the party wiggling freestyle, like it's 2020, seemed completely out of place. Even the music seems like 1940s jazz, not music from the 1920s. Not once did a character dance the Charleston or the foxtrot. Instead Robbie's character performed over-sexualized dances that wouldn't be seen on dance floors for another 60 or 70 years.
Later, when she miraculously is inserted into a movie set, she is told to dance, and does the same thing, causing one of the male actors in the scene to have an erection in full view of the director.
I had to stop myself at that point and think about the time period of the film, and she may be on more solid ground than I first realized, because this was before the Motion Picture Production code came into effect in 1934.
Late 1920s films were quite a bit more sexualized and violent than later time periods, and the movie industry, fearing government regulation was on the way, implemented a voluntary code of conduct that govern the film industry into the late 1960s.
None of this, of course, is explained in this film, but it does touch on the terrible working conditions for extras, the rauchous parties (though it's hard to believe that what the director portrays here actually occurred) and the racism of early Hollywood faced by minorites. Though a Hispanic man, an Asian woman, and a black man seem to have easily entered the Hollywood system in this film. Perhaps too easily.
A good chunk of the film attempts to tell the story of the difficult transition from silent films to films with sound. Some actors, like Conrad and La Roy (whose thick New Jersey accent pegs her as "low class") don't make the transition.
Jean Smart plays a savvy Hollywood gossip reporter who breaks the news to Conrad that his career is ending. Her soliloquy about Hollywood and the fact that those existing on film will live forever is one of the high points of the film. and succeeds in1 giving it some heart.
But such high points have to compete with the raunchy humor of an elephant pooping on a man's head, Robbie's character barfing on a man's expensive rug, and a man being urinated on during the opening party scene.
A scene in which Conrad and a colleague are ushed into an underground club of sorts by a gangster played by Tobey Maguire, features a would-be actor biting a rat in half could have been easily cut.
Because the director is trying to tell 10 stories at once, we hear about Sidney, a black jazz musician played by Jovan Adepo, whom Torres put in a movie of his own, but is quickly alienated by Hollywood when he, a somewhat light-skinned man, is told to put on black face in order to blend in with the other black musicians. This, like several other tales here, is only briefly mentioned as if they are SNL sketches.
Another character that flies into the film and quickly out again without much exposition is Lady Fay Zhu, played by Li Jun Li, a dialogue card designer for the silent films, who also checks the 2020s diversity box as a sultry lesbian caberet singer.
Chazelle wraps up this epically long film with a bizarre and oddly hurried ending that attempts to show the demise of the actors after Hollywood's transition to talkies.
No spoilers here, but there are a few tragic ends in the film, just as there were tragedies in old Hollywood.
The entirely predictable death of an actor, the death of a movie extra at the hands of another extra wielding actual weapons during a battle scene, an actor who overdoses at the opening party, and a sound technician on an early sound stage are all quickly touched on but aren't significant to the plot, because there basically is no plot here, to speak of.
The entire film could have been shortened by 45 minutes and still been understood, especially if the director had narrowed his focus to a single plot. Instead, he was so enamored with shocking his audience that he forgot to include one.
