Rules Don't Apply

Warren Beatty returns to the screen for the first time since 2001 to play eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes in this comedy drama set largely in Hollywood as the 1950s edges into the 1960s. After an opening caption warning us that it'll play fast and loose with the facts, what follows unfolds a few years after Hughes's real-life tenure at RKO Pictures. The movie faithfully re-creates the capricious industrialist's tendency to sign young women to highly paid contracts, keep them in luxury, then never actually give them any movies to do. One such hopeful is the gamine Lily Collins, who finds her upright Christian values tested when she falls for her ambitious chauffeur Alden Ehrenreich - though Hughes strictly forbids such fraternisation. The intrigue which follows is mildly amusing, vaguely romantic and, like Beatty's sometimes vulnerable, sometimes knockabout central performance, entirely ill-focused. Is it a story about the resilient dreams of youth or the regrets of befuddled old age? Either way, it shows Beatty the actor and the director, seemingly unsure of his own intentions and, sadly, rather past his best.