Warren Beatty’s Self-Sparing Embodiment of Howard Hughes

Warren Beatty’s new film, “Rules Don’t Apply,” set mainly in 1959 and framed by a sequence that takes place in 1964, is two movies in one, and they’re drastically different in tone, substance, and affect. One is a febrile romantic satire centered on two young people in Howard Hughes’s employ—Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins), newly arrived in Hollywood as one of the dozens of starlets under contract to Hughes in view of a batch of movies that may never be made, and Frank Forbes (Alden Ehrenreich), a driver for Hughes who, at the start of the story, has never driven (or even seen) Hughes, but who is dispatched to serve as Marla’s chauffeur. The other is a comedy of pathos, the story of Hughes himself (played by Beatty), a voluble, idiosyncratic, cavalier, obsessive recluse who’s integrally involved in his businesses—especially in the aeronautical side, where his ambitions run deep and his vision is far-reaching—and fighting to retain control of them, because his peculiar habits cast doubt on his ability to manage them and, indeed, on his sanity.