As I write this, the memory is fresh of Julianne Moore winning

As I write this, the memory is fresh of Julianne Moore winning her Oscar—finally!—for mentally perishing in About Alice. It’s not a great movie, but who cares? She’s done so much excellent work over the years that there’s no point in quibbling over her superior performances in much better films. (And yet I can’t help myself: Boogie Nights, Far From Heaven, The Hours, The End of the Affair . . . but no, back to the movie at hand.)

Maps’ second most prominent name, after Moore, is that of director David Cronenberg, who has also had a long, though more varied, career, including both highs (The Fly, Eastern Promises) and lows (eXistenZ). He began in horror, while Moore started onstage and in soaps. But Maps really bears the imprint of screenwriter Bruce Wagner, whose insider novels about Hollywood (I’m Losing You, Memorial, etc.) are drenched in knowing wit and sordid detail. It doesn’t matter if his Tinseltown writing has any basis in truth; his novels’ appeal—and I am a guilty fan—lies in readers wanting to imagine the worst about their matinee idols. Maps is the product of such venomous, take-down confabulation. It’s beneath Moore, but also a nasty and nearly welcome tonic for her dull, blameless martyrhood to Alzheimer’s in About Alice.

Maps has a different fate in store for the Oscar-hungry, over-the-hill actress Havana (Moore), who hires a particularly unsuitable young woman as her personal assistant (or “chore whore” in the parlance). Agatha (Mia Wasikowska, from Tracks and The Kids Are Alright) arrives without prospects in L.A., her only contact a Twitter friendship with Carrie Fisher (later to cameo, of course). Something’s clearly not right with Agatha, a timid soul on many psych meds and covered with burn scars. We’re also introduced to self-help guru Stafford (John Cusack), his wife (Olivia Williams), and bratty teen actor son (Evan Bird); all these figures will play a role in the fortunes of Havana, Agatha, and the dim, decent limo driver (Robert Pattinson, back from Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis) who ferries them all around.

All Wagner novels feature dense, gothic backstories of corruption and conspiracy. Pathologies are revealed, rehab is reversed, and sexual deviance becomes the new white-bread normal. The problem to Wagner’s oeuvre, and here, is that it all becomes so grindingly obvious. We watch to see the worst in Maps, it’s revealed, and absolutely nothing about it is surprising. (Even the ghosts are predictable.) Also, unforgivable in the inside-Hollywood canon, Wagner can’t craft dialogue or be funny to save his life. Billy Wilder’s tossed-away tissues contain more wit than his glib, pissy writing.

As a result, a lot of talent is wasted here. Moore’s Havana, like every other character, becomes more grating and ridiculous the longer we know her. Cusack, his career more ill-starred, suggests a kind of pathetic, defeated Tony Robbins with Stafford (who wears guyliner and those individually toed running moccasins); the long-form writers at HBO could surely do something better with a showbiz charlatan like this.

Still, let it be said that Maps contains at least one good joke: If you’re going to be bludgeoned to death in Hollywood, at least let it be with your own Oscar. Because any other kind of death just isn’t worth having.

film@seattleweekly.com

MAPS TO THE STARS Opens Fri., Feb. 27 at Sundance and SIFF Cinema Uptown. Rated R. 111 minutes.