Some People Just Don't Get the Picture

It's one of those weird universal truths: Just as mechanics usually drive the worst cars, so too are Hollywood movies about celebrities usually the least interesting. Directors and screenwriters may have the most insight into the gruesome inner workings of the star factory, but they're also the ones with the most to lose if they tell all, so their celebrity satires are generally as limp and harmless as a de-clawed 60-year-old Persian kitten.

Tom DiCillo's "Delirious" neatly sidesteps this problem by opting to say nothing at all about celebrity, instead telling a modern-day fairy tale about a gaggle of folks who inhabit the celebrity ecosystem. The result is a movie that's unrealistic and contrived but also quite charming. You won't stare into the dark heart of Hollywood, but you will walk out of the theater with a big, goofy grin plastered across your face.

Toby Grace (Michael Pitt) is one of those impossibly sexy homeless kids that movies set in New York seem to find living under every cardboard box. Yes, he sleeps in a dumpster, but it's a dumpster where the rats give him complimentary skin treatments and highlights while he sleeps. Dopey and innocent, he drifts one day into the middle of a paparazzi stakeout, where he meets Les Galantine (Steve Buscemi) a self-aggrandizing paparazzo trying to snap a picture of K'Harma (Alison Lohman), a hot young pop twig whose roller coaster love life is America's latest obsession. In a strange coincidence (the movie's chock full of them), it turns out that K'Harma is Toby's unattainable dream girl; he's like a stalker, only innocent and sweet instead of dangerous and scary. With no ambition of his own, Toby gets sucked into Les's orbit, becoming his unpaid assistant and whipping boy.

For a while, Les and Toby squirm their way into VIP rooms and live off benefit buffets and goodie bags while trying to snap the perfect picture. But suddenly, like Alice in Wonderland, Toby finds himself pulled through the looking glass via a veritable vortex of coincidences, and he's deposited in K'Harma's world of glamour and popularity. What he finds there isn't a disintegrating pop Lolita with cocaine in her jeans and crazed ambition corroding her brain, but a princess trapped in a glass coffin, looking for a kiss from Prince Charming to set her free.

As our Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty embark on the road to true love, the film starts to swerve all over the road like a drunk driver on the world's scariest police chase before yanking the wheel back over into sticky sentimentality, then suddenly fishtailing into cardboard Hollywood satire before getting back on course just in time for the end credits. Improbably, the final scenes are rock solid and they land with the impact of body blows; it's such a surprise that this movie hasn't gone totally off the rails that you might find yourself weeping tears of relief.

Mr. DiCillo first entered public awareness with his indie satire "Living in Oblivion" and he immediately exited public awareness with his next three movies, "Box of Moonlight," "The Real Blonde," and "Double Whammy," each of which played to an exponentially smaller audience ("Double Whammy" went straight to video). But even if he's destined to become a footnote of 1990s filmmaking, Mr. DiCillo will always be the director who got two great performances out of Mr. Buscemi. There are a lot of reasons to like "Delirious" — Gina Gershon's rueful and sexy turn as a predatory casting agent is a standout — but Mr. Buscemi's Les is the performance of his career. Pale and nervous, like something you'd find hiding under a rock, he's the kind of guy who hates celebrities but can't stop enthusing about the time he met De Niro. His apartment is full of junk that he can't bring himself to throw away, he lives paycheck to paycheck, and he's always planning to turn his life and career around tomorrow or maybe the next day.

In other words, he's a New Yorker, and when he's touched by a little bit of beauty at the end of "Delirious," you feel like you've been granted access to a state of grace yourself.