Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale

6 out of 10 stars: The Aviator is a gorgeous and fascinating film, a big Vanity Fair article sprung to life and suffused with directorial flairs that drop onto your lap like magazine inserts saying "Subscribe to Martin Scorsese's for Best Director and save 25% off the newsstand price."

The man who helmed the very great films Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and The Age of Innocence has had a string of ambitious messes of late, including Casino, Kundun (which was like reading Leviticus) and Gangs of New York. The Aviator fits in neither category. It's ambitious but it's not a mess. It's not great, but it's imminently worth watching.

Aviator is Scorsese's take on the life of eccentric mogul Howard Hughes, focusing on the years between 1928-1954. Hughes (played by the always talented—damn him--Leonardo DiCaprio is first seen trying to film his mammoth World War I fighter pilot epic, Hell's Angels, some three years in the making. He's squiring Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani, so flat she may as well have been cut-out of a glamour magazine) to premieres. He's also building a business empire from the successful drill bit business his father left him to the behemoth that would be Hughes Aircraft, creating the fastest plane on earth in the process.

This is glamorous, glossy Howard Hughes, the women, the movies, the fast planes, the fights with the government, the money. The film also means to explain the man, with brief flashbacks to his childhood, and his mother washing him while she inculcated him with her phobias and paranoia. Wrapping up the lifelong mental afflictions of the man in a one minute washing scene is trite and not very convincing. So too follow most of the insights into Hughes the man, not Hughes the myth.

And it's Hughes the myth that seems to interest Scorsese the most: standing in the cockpit of a plane with a camera, shooting the bi-planes whizzing past, entering the famous nightclub, the Copocobana (with luscious set designs by Dante Ferretti--it smells hedonistic).

DiCaprio, as Hughes, is as good as he's ever been. He's believable as a man unable to control his compulsions, whether that's to capitalism or to repeating a phrase ad nauseum. Where he really shines, however, is during the Senate hearings on war profiteering after World War II. He catches not only the timbre of Hughes, but the defiance of the man, something we don't see anywhere else. Perhaps it's because DiCaprio had something to base his performance on that separates these scenes from the rest of the film.

Meanwhile Cate Blanchett turns a nifty parlor trick into a performance. Her Katharine Hepburn strikes one, at first, as pure imitation. But it ripens into something more during the film. One can sense the woman behind the chipped, pelican delivery. Her best moment is in a bathroom, and she tries to salvage the relationship between she and Hughes, and at her family estate, when her cavalier, boarding-school demeanor dooms it.

One other problem with the film is Scorsese's determination to entertain, mainly with insertions of humor, which rarely work in his films as is (After Hours notwithstanding), and comes off particularly poorly here. It's ill-timed.and tends to announce itself. One moment, where Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale, sweet but hardly as formidable as she should be) finds Hughes squirreled away in his house, his mania in complete control, is a good example. As she surveys the devastation (Hughes has turned his home into controlled zones with tape and wire, making it look like a spider's lair) she quips, "Love what you've done with the place." Perhaps it's Beckinsale's delivery but it doesn't make you believe she's reaching out to him with humor to ease the awkwardness of the situation, or that she's coolly assessing it either. It's just a punchline.

There is also the use of green screens to film the aviation sequences, which Scorsese uses far too often in this film. There have to be four shots where we swoop in from the clouds and approach the plane. It's fakey the first time (Hughes filming Hell's Angels with what amounts to a hand-held camera) and Scorsese keeps doing it. At these times The Aviator comes off as a very expensive, very special edition of Amazing Stories made for Biography.

Still, the time flew watching the film (so Scorcese did entertain me). It's certain I know more about Howard Hughes from watching The Aviator but its veneer keeps it from being a story about a man; Hughes remains a myth.