So much of Tom DiCillo’s new film, “Delirious,” is about the trench warfare of the celebrity world — namely the paparazzi, who elbow one another for a better place along the velvet rope, waiting for celebrity X or starlet Y to emerge so they can make their money, a couple hundred bucks for an honest night’s stalking.

But be careful how you use the term paparazzi around Mr. DiCillo, for he hardly thinks that “Delirious,” which opens Wednesday, falls neatly into that genre of films solely preoccupied with the agonies of celebrity culture.

“I don’t mean to nitpick — in some ways, it is about the paparazzi, but in many ways it’s much more interested in the human factor, and the desperation and struggles at the heart of this equation,” Mr. DiCillo said. “Really, there’s a very bizarre phenomenon going on here, as these photographers idolize these celebrities, yet at the same time are ruthless in terms of ripping them apart in the most compromising way possible.”

Interviewing both photographers and various celebrities for the film, Mr. DiCillo said the story evolved unexpectedly as he wrote it, becoming less about the specific back-and-forth between celebrities and photographers, and more about something universal in the way celebrities fit into a larger cultural myth. Constructing what he described as a fable and an “homage to the myth of the film business,” Mr. DiCillo relied on three central characters to bring this psychological debate to life. Les, played by Steve Buscemi, is a ruthless celebrity photographer who looks down on his targeted celebrities but who is also looked down upon by his parents, who consider his work a worthless enterprise. K’Harma, played by AlisonLohman, is the established celebrity who hides out in hotels, runs away from men like Les, and only has her two yes-men publicists to lean on when she starts to suffer something resembling a stardom breakdown. Toby, played by Michael Pitt, is the in-between: the homeless teenager who slowly befriends K’Harma on his way from nobody to celebrity, forcing Les to confront his beliefs about the humans on the other side of his camera lens.

What unfolds in “Delirious” is a searing look at a man (Les) whose entire belief structure and sense of self-worth is suddenly challenged.

“It’s really based around this sense of schizophrenia in terms of the paparazzi,” Mr. DiCillo said. “One the one hand, they insist that the stars are nobodies, and they are superior to them. But on the other hand, they are absolutely convinced that these are superior human beings to themselves, and that they are worthless. The conflict becomes how those two schizophrenic personalities collide.”

Appropriately, “Delirious” positions Les in a variety of situations that go against his conventional, us-vs.-them experiences. As Toby becomes more famous, Les starts to take credit for his success, yet in several instances he also tries to sabotage the young protégé. When the tabloids pick up one of Les’s photographs, his paparazzi colleagues turn on him in a bout of jealousy. Meanwhile, as Toby starts to break in to the celebrity ranks, he tries to bring Les along with him to a celebrity-packed birthday party. Suddenly, Les the photographer finds himself in a room with the famous people he simultaneously reveres and despises, incapacitated as his mind drowns in confusion, relying on his camera to re-establish a barrier.

Which plays right into Mr. DiCillo’s perception of this larger “Hollywood myth.” Les, in many ways, is the bottom-feeder of this world, surviving by stealing the images of these celebrities. But Mr. DiCillo said this theme goes beyond the likes of Les, and that we all, in one way or another, seek out entertainment in the hope of taking something away from that image on a movie screen — seeking validation through that reflection of ourselves. The myth we live by, Mr. DiCillo said, implies that Toby, K’Harma, and those like them have an innocence and a purity that we don’t; it is only through our consumption of their work that the purity may rub off on us.

The key to “Delirious” is its double-edged performances — Mr. Buscemi playing Les as the wounded predator and Mr. Pitt giving the pure Toby an aura of the not-so-naïve manipulator. It’s in the latter character that Mr. DiCillo said his planning for the film came to a standstill.

“As a writer, I had written myself into a very tricky situation,” he said. “I needed someone who seemed believable crawling out of a dumpster but at the same time was completely believable on the red carpet, with thousands of people adoring him. Most actors who play homeless people, it rings absolutely false. The same thing with actors playing famous people; it just seems like they’re acting.”

Mr. Pitt, as it turned out, could make Toby believable, giving Mr. DiCillo a pivot point around which to wrap this story of fleeting stardom and enduring desperation. The same occurred in Mr. DiCillo’s “The Real Blonde,” with Matthew Modine playing an aspiring actor who debates lowering his standards to pay the bills, and in “Box of Moonlight,” with Jon Turturro playing a middle-age electrical engineer going through a midlife crisis. Mr. Pitt’s Toby and Mr. Buscemi’s Les are two men caught unaware, unsure of how to respond to a world changing around them by the second. It’s an enduring theme in Mr. DiCillo’s work — these self-defining epiphanies that take his characters much by surprise.

“You never know when those moments are going to hit you in your life, and when they do, wow, they hit you on your a–, and that’s a great ingredient for a story,” he said. “And you see that here, too. There’s the scene where Les comes running back up the stairs and Toby’s on the street, running free, and they are now in very different worlds. These things happen and you’re never the same. And it’s that struggle which is why so many people are drawn to stardom or want to be famous in the first place: They think it will enable them to forget everything they need to do about themselves. If the whole world tells you you’re fantastic, then you’re fantastic.”

ssnyder@nysun.com