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.