The new Truman Capote biopic “Infamous” suffers both from the difficulties intrinsic to recreating a famous life and from being late to the marketplace.

Director Douglas McGrath is all too familiar with the film “Capote,” which came out last year to great accolades, including five Academy Award nominations and an Oscar for Philip Seymour Hoffman in the title role. Though “Infamous” was completed shortly after “Capote,” the studio decided to hold the film until now to avoid coinciding with that film too much.

But the comparisons are inevitable. Beyond the joint releases making it seem like Capote season on screen, both films track the same period in the writer’s life, when his interest in a family’s murder in rural middle America led him to Holcomb, Kan., to research and write his nonfiction novel “In Cold Blood.”

As Sandra Bullock’s Harper Lee says of Capote in “Infamous,” the book “made him and it broke him.” “In Cold Blood” made the author an incredibly wealthy household name. But he never wrote another book.

The appeal of depicting a figure as blind to his own inhuman emotions as he is drawn to those of his subjects is undeniable. And both films show how the pursuit of the artist’s greatest success led to his greatest failure.

But “Infamous” often feels like a knock-off. Whereas “Capote” worked despite its famous subject and celebrity cast,”Infamous” basks in the artifice of celebrity.

This is not a slight against the lesser-known Toby Jones, who takes the title role in this film and fully inhabits the persona of the auteur and dilettante that Capote became known as. He looks eerily like the “tiny terror” and completely loses himself in creating an almost exact replica of what Capote looked and sounded like. He deftly maneuvers between the comic and tragic, creating an inspired mimicry.

But as skilled as Mr. Jones is, the production that he helms only underscores the triumph of the earlier “Capote.” The star-studded re-enactment of “Infamous” is as close an approximation of Capote’s life at the time that one is liable to get, but “Capote” consciously avoided that path. Due merely to the constrictions of Mr. Hoffman’s size and demeanor, he could never hide himself so perfectly within the persona of Capote.

But by avoiding many of the effete quirks that came to define Capote’s public life, Mr. Hoffman breathed fresh life into a genre predicated on presenting the walking dead. “Capote” was not an intricate replication of a famous person’s life, but a winning drama based on real events.

Most celebrity biopics resemble funhouse mirrors, appealing for their similarities to reality and also in the subtle ways they warp the original. But that exercise has a limited appeal. What set “Capote” apart from most of the genre was its willingness to do away with the well-known caricature of the man. “Infamous” is more concerned with the artifice of celebrity life, and there are joys to be had in watching re-created scenes from this era of fleeting glamour and Capote’s ephemeral connection to it all.

Watching Capote cavort with his powerful friends amid New York’s high life presents a meaningful contrast with life in tiny Holcomb, where the townspeople are living in the wake of a brutal murder. But even the residents of Holcomb are intrigued by Capote’s relation to celebrity, and the film name-drops in various ways.

Though Capote’s effete persona first put off the Midwestern townspeople, his proximity to celebrity eventually drew them to him. Conversely, the film has filled the roles of his high society friends with big-name actors who initially bring the audience into their detailed approximations of other well-known people. For good measure, the film drops the famous characters’ names on the screen.

Sigournery Weaver leads the pack of socialites as a shimmering Babe Paley. British actress Juliet Stevenson is Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, who holds court in a recreation of her famous red salon. Isabella Rossellini plays Neapolitan princess Marella Agnelli; Peter Bogdanovich is Capote’s publisher, Bennett Cerf; and Hope Davis appears as socialite Slim Keith, giving the production the air of regality that often tinged Capote’s life. The film also foreshadows his imminent break from these famous friends due to his later drink- and drug-fueled downward spiral and his partially published tell-all “Answered Prayers.”

But the narrative device of the celebrity interview to introduce these characters serves to distance the audience as much as appeal to their celebrity. And in contrast, the more intimate scenes often have trouble getting past their implied gravitas.Ms. Bullock, in the role of moral crutch for her eccentric friend, plays Harper Lee far too broadly. Though Ms. Bullock should get some credit for expanding her range, her portrayal never gets far from caricature. From the way she stands with her legs awkwardly spread just a bit too far apart on a train platform to her insistently dowdy demeanor, Ms. Bullock is aggressively antiurban rather than subtly soothing, as the action seems to demand.

More than just competing with the enduring image of the still living Ms. Lee, Ms. Bullock has the unenviable task of competing with the definitive performance of Catherine Keener in “Capote.” Ms. Keener’s understated style imbued Ms. Lee with a knowing elegance and humor that seems severely lacking here.

Ms. Bullock, like many of the actors here, seems too impressed with the weight of her own words.Seldom do real life people pause between their every. Word. For. Effect. Yet from Daniel Craig as Perry Smith to a Holcomb farmer being interviewed by Capote and Ms. Lee, that. Is. What. Happens. Here.

Similarly, many of the actors are caught up in re-enacting the glamour of the period. Most problematic is a glamorous Gwyneth Paltrow, who for the life of her cannot shed the self-conscious trappings of her modern self to embody a sexy, soulful lounge singer in an early scene.

Mr. Jones’s performance makes great strides toward countering this thread in the film. And though some of his thunder will likely be stolen by the overwhelming memory of Mr. Hoffman in the same role, his efforts will surely be a boon to his Hollywood career.

Mr. Jones and the cast often masterfully shuffle from the irreverent to the tragic, but the film spins in place when distracting conventions are utilized to propel the action. Instead of drawing the audience in, flashbacks, interviews, and re-enactments of the killings work as interruptions of artifice.

“Infamous” presents a layered portrayal of Capote’s connection to both his high society friends and the violent rural life he came from, but many of its exacting replications serve to diminish the final product.

It is plainly unlucky that the film was unable to get an earlier release. Had it made it to the big screen first, “Infamous” would be remembered as a star-studded period piece. But, as “Capote” put its genre-shifting imprimatur there first, “Infamous” has the unfortunate predicament of being second in most every way.