“Attitude” perfectly sums up the highest aspiration of much of today’s popular culture. It is to us what “respectability” was to the Victorians: the tribute we pay to the supreme importance of keeping up appearances. Indeed, attitude glories in appearance even more than respectability does. You could lose respectability, but attitude is forever.

The respectable art of the Victorian era has mostly and deservedly been forgotten, and I predict that the same fate awaits the “attitude” art — much of it in cinematic form — of our own time.The latest example of such art is Steven Zaillian’s adaptation of Robert Penn Warren’s loosely fictionalized account of Governor Huey Long of Louisiana, “All the King’s Men.”

It has to be said that Penn Warren’s novel, published in 1946, was to some extent an early example of attitude art, but the author effectively disguised the fact by swaddling his rather feeble mise-en-scène — the novel was essentially little more than one of a raft of self-consciously “disillusioned” post-war coming-of-age stories — in fine writing, masses of authentic-sounding period detail, and hints of political seriousness.

Of that camouflage, only the period detail survives in Mr. Zaillian’s movie. And, to give it its due, that’s not nothing. The washed out, faux black-and-white look of it — seemingly, 90% of this portrait of sun-baked Louisiana is in night scenes — is gorgeous. Hollywood’s devotion to attitude does at least produce great visuals.

But the hollowness, indeed, the vacuity, behind the appearance is all too cruelly exposed, especially in the film’s politics. Where Penn Warren made the demagoguery of his Longlike hero, Willie Stark, the back-drop to his own tragic personal story, the new movie (director Robert Rossen’s 1949 adaptation won that year’s Oscar for best picture) reverses the relationship, making the personal story into an incidental soap opera and moving the demagoguery to center stage.

It doesn’t work, and a moment’s thought will tell us why. Willie is the governor of Louisiana; not a dictator, not a tyrant, not even a very important figure on the national scene. His future as a totalitarian is nil, and is seen to be nil. He’s a small-timer to the very marrow, which is what gave him his tragic stature in Penn Warren’s eyes.

Yet Mr. Zaillian repeatedly gives would-be scary shots of his Willie (Sean Penn) in the full flood of a Hitlerian harangue to rapt crowds of poor Louisianans. These shots undoubtedly appealed to Mr. Penn’s talent for the histrionic as well as his political proclivities, but they only underline the picture’s political unseriousness.

On one occasion, a torch-lit night-time scene in front of what looks like a monumental Mussolinian or Stalinist edifice, is obviously designed to look like a Nazi rally at Nuremberg. The camera catches Willie’s shadow, supposedly cast to several times life-size by the flickering torchlight on the massive structure behind him, and we are meant to think (I surmise) that the menacing shadow of fascism stalks the land.

The occasion is the dedication of a medical center.

It’s absurd, of course, but then attitude movies don’t have to make sense. Not making sense is rather the point of them. The carelessness with which they treat details of plot and characterization is typical of their cavalier disdain for humdrum, everyday reality.

For instance, we are told that Willie is under impeachment from the legislature, but there is no mention of what he is being impeached for. It’s enough, I guess, to hint at a general atmosphere of corruption — even though the film also makes the familiar point that corruption is a way of life in Louisiana.

Likewise, we know there is an estrangement between newspaper reporter turned gubernatorial lackey Jack Burden (Jude Law), the film’s self-hating, disillusioned first-person narrator, and his lost love, Anne Stanton (Kate Winslet). But there is no explanation for it apart from a flashback scene in which, many years earlier, he had for no very persuasive reason refused her sexual advances. It doesn’t add up.

We have to take Jack’s unfulfilled longing on trust, which means we also have to take it on trust that he will react as he does to the information that Anne is sleeping with Willie — a fact also unaccounted for. Is she just a power-groupie? She doesn’t remotely seem the type. But, again, the film doesn’t see the need to explain.

Her brother, Adam (Mark Ruffalo), is a portrait in pure attitude. A tortured saint and genius, he hates Willie like the rest of his aristocratic connections, apart from Jack. But then he seems to hate the whole world, including himself, as he hides himself away in a dingy flat and plays the piano. What’s wrong with Adam? The film has no ideas on the subject.

When Adam gets his gun and goes after Willie, it is supposedly because he thinks Willie is trying to frame him on corruption charges relating to the medical center. The idea makes no sense, but okay, maybe Adam’s brains are scrambled by whatever it is that’s wrong with him. This motivation, such as it is, has to be supplied presumably because the only one Penn Warren mentions — the aristocratic Southern gentleman’s outrage at his sister’s “whoredom” by such a creature as Willie — wouldn’t seem enough to today’s audience.

Why the sudden concern with supplying a plausible motivation, even though it’s not very plausible, when Mr. Zaillian hasn’t bothered with any up until now? There must be some lingering sense left over from the old days when, as Alfred Hitchcock said, the soul of the cinema was plot, some sense that a set-up was required for the visually if not dramatically shocking dénouement.

That there’s not more of this sense is further testimony to the fact that, now, the soul of the cinema is attitude.