LA Without A Map

"Hollywood is all fucked up: you have to kiss people's asses and shit like that" explained the great Julie Delpy in a recent interview. Hollywood, of course, is invariably loath to depict itself in such an unflattering light - but LA Without A Map is a truly savage inditement of cine's heartlessness, and deserves to be seen for that reason alone.

It's also badly-plotted, dodgily acted and utterly preposterous - in fact it's an absolute mess - but you can't help enjoying it to the hilt. Think A Life Less Ordinary, and you're getting somewhere.

Richard (Tennent), a Bradford undertaker in his early twenties with an annoying sub-Ewan MacGregor rural Scots burr, is resigned to a life of drudgery until Barbara (Shaw), an impossibly glamorous Hollywood starlet on the make, spends a day with him in Bradford. She returns to Tinseltown, he goes crazy thinking about her, and after a brief period of reflection he flies out to look for her.

He arrives in LA with no address and no phone number, but still finds her with ridiculous ease. She seems superficially glad to see him, but the situation isn't as simple as Richard had figured: she has a Hollywood career to advance, which basically means sleeping with every slimeball director or producer in sight. A romance of sorts develops, in painfully stop-start fashion: he keeps being put on hold and told to "play along".

In the interim, Richard moves into the scuzziest ghetto in LA, where a hippy-ish Vincent Gallo takes him under his wing. Any faint semblance of realism flies out the window from this point on. Our hero manages to sustain himself for weeks with no apparent source of income, and there are any amount of other inconsistencies you could care to mention. Most crucially, the Richard/Barbara relationship is easily the least credible coupling I've ever witnessed in a movie.

Still, in spite of its inherent flaws, there's a whole lot to enjoy about LA Without A Map: Gallo and Julie Delpy chip in with class performances, Johnny Depp turns up in the odd scene as a silent mentor akin to Clarence's Elvis In True Romance, and the directors/producers/etc. are depicted as a bunch of egomaniacal, self-centred, ill-mannered wankers who have to be seen to be believed.

In spite of all its multifarious niggling flaws, LA somehow manages to be a winner.