Ivans xtc (18)

Hollywood babbles on

Like another famous story of Hollywood rottenness, Ivans xtc opens with its protagonist dead. Hotshot movie agent Ivan Beckman is not face down in the swimming-pool like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard, but flatlining on a hospital bed, consumed by cancer. It's a testament to the world Ivan inhabited that when the news of his death is broken to his agency colleagues during a boardroom pow-wow, the initial shock almost immediately gives way to a practical consideration: how to hang on to his client list. Then they start wondering what drugs might have killed him – the idea that it was cancer is dismissed as a joke.

The British director Bernard Rose, filming on digital video, is partly adapting from a Tolstoy novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and partly rehearsing the story of the real-life agent Jay Moloney, whose success at über-agency CAA in the 1980s was as spectacular as his career combustion in the 1990s. Moloney (who signed up Rose himself in 1989) was a legendary sybarite whose fast-lane lifestyle careened into addiction, burn-out and, eventually, suicide. Such was the black cloud he left behind that the agency banned even the mention of his name. Ivans xtc (read: ecstasy) isn't out to rehabilitate Moloney, however, only to train a spotlight on Hollywood's insiders and how they treat their own, so prepare for a particular brand of sleaze you perhaps won't encounter anywhere else in the world.

From his funeral, the story flashes back a few days to a moment when triumph and disaster play a classic one-two on the golden-boy agent. Ivan (Danny Huston) has just schmoozed A-list actor Don West (Peter Weller, in a repulsive turn) into taking the lead role on his latest project. Too bad Ivan hasn't actually read the script, and too bad he's just dumped the struggling writer-director in order to secure West, but that's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise. The agency practically proclaim Ivan a god, and it's high-fives and air-kisses all round. Puffed up with pride, he then gets a call from his doctor that knocks the wind right out of him: there's a shadow on his chest X-ray, and it looks like cancer.

Who can he turn to? Not his girlfriend Charlotte (Lisa Enos), who seems more interested in advancing her career and flirting with West. Not his family, either. His dad is too remote, and his sister (Marcia Beckman) will just break his balls about, well, everything, including Charlotte. "Ivan's got himself another cokehead girlfriend," she says at the dinner table, and another family get-together is ruined. He invites two of his favourite call-girls over to snort coke and play "truth or dare", but when Ivan confesses his condition it seems that this isn't the game they're used to. Agents should know not to tell the truth in any case – look what happened to Jerry Maguire.

With its edgy, verité-style camerawork and improvised dialogue, the film creates a mood of fearless confrontation: the Hollywood snakepit exposed! It's rather like what another British director, Mike Figgis, has been pegging away at in his last couple of movies, Time Code and Hotel, which also go heavy on megalomaniac directors, spoilt, coke-addled actors and their gruesome entourage of girlfriends and hangers-on. Ivans xtc pointedly rolls the boilerplate about "no resemblance to persons living or dead" over the opening credits (it's usually saved till the end) but this merely compounds the impression that certain "persons" in the industry, other than Jay Moloney, are getting their comeuppance. It would be interesting to know, for example, who the model was for Peter Weller's swaggering brute, spitting homophobic disgust and making the most casual remark sound like a threat.

It's safe to assume that Bernard Rose is getting some professional pique off his chest here, having suffered the classic Hollywood indignity of losing a movie. In his case, it was a lavish adaptation of Anna Karenina he made back in 1996, a picture eventually taken out of his hands and trimmed by the studio on the grounds that Anna's character was unsympathetic. No surprise, then, that the tone of Ivans xtc is so mordant and personal; there's even a role for Adam Krentzman, Rose's subsequent agent, who's the first to scurry round to Don West's house and make nice following Ivan's demise.

One wonders, all the same, how much the world needs this reminder of Tinseltown turpitude. That the place is a sink of greed, venality and self-interest is hardly news, and even the Hollywood mainstream has cottoned on to the potential of looking inward. From The Player a decade ago to America's Sweethearts last year, what seemed to begin as self-examination has blurred into a peculiar sort of self-regard.

There is, nevertheless, a persuasive reason to see this film, and it's Danny Huston's demonic geniality in the role of Ivan. Huston is something of a composite figure; in his voice one hears the self-confident drawl of his late father, John, while his eyebrows have a little of Jack Nicholson's devilry. But in Ivan's charming, ever-courteous manner one traces the ghostly features of the young Orson Welles, the baby-faced twinkler whose smile hides a raging appetite for self-destruction. (If anyone should have taken up agenting, it's Harry Lime.)

Huston uses his big body expressively, leaning towards people as if interested in what they have to say, a natural affability that hides a terrible loneliness at his centre. The great gulps he takes from his martini suggest not just a committed consumer but a man who might willingly drown himself in booze. Yet the film makes no great claims for his soul. Unlike Tolstoy's Ivan, also dying of cancer, he asks himself no great questions about the life he's about to leave behind. His is the tragedy of a gregarious man who hadn't a single true friend. There seems to be not one person who, on hearing that Ivan Beckman died from cancer, might say, "How terrible" rather than "What's that a cover story for?"