Julianne Moore shines in hypnotic, repulsive ‘Maps to the Stars’ (B)

David Cronenberg has never been a creature of Hollywood; some of his odder films suggest he might not be a creature of this planet. So the macabre Canadian has no qualms about taking a serrated lead pipe to the egos and emotional deficiencies of movie-industry delusion in his latest, Maps to the Stars.

The gargoyles that prowl Maps constitute a vivid gallery of grotesques, driven by outsize vanity and poisoned by skewed priorities. The incest at the center of the plot serves as a suitable metaphor for the moral rot that contaminates nearly every character. These simply aren't very nice people. They are, however, exquisitely acted, and Cronenberg, working from a script by Bruce Wagner, knows how to bring every bit of their damage to creepy light.

Fame is a drug in Maps to the Stars, and its users are beyond rehabilitation. They include Havana Segrand (Julianne Moore, arguably better here than in Still Alice, which just won her an Oscar), a bitter, pill-popping actress angling to star in a biopic about her late, abusive mother; Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird), a former child star stumbling through adolescence as he prepares for the new Bad Babysitter movie; and Benjie's estranged sister, Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), the only one of many crazy characters who is officially acknowledged as such. She once drugged her little brother and burned down the family house. Yeah, she's bad news.

Fame is a drug in Maps to the Stars, and its users are beyond rehabilitation. 

The characters are linked thematically and through interlaced plot points. Many of them also suffer from magical realist illusions involving victims of their foul ways. Kind of like the Macbeths, if they lived in a self-lacerating reality TV show instead of old Scotland. They don't really try to outrun their demons. The decay is too far along for that, even in the bright California sun.

A Cronenberg film is always of a piece. There's seldom anything emotionally welcoming, but the tone is steady, and the images carry a visceral impact. He rarely gets enough credit for the performances in his films; good luck finding a Jeremy Irons turn better than the tortured twin gynecologists of Dead Ringers.

In Maps, it's Moore's time to shine. No one in the movies today falls apart with more authority and venom (see her pharmacy breakdown scene in Magnolia). Her damaged star in Maps is a walking corpse still very much animated by her neurotic impulses. Moore delivers something remarkable here: a completely ego-free portrait of a woman who knows only ego.

Maps to the Stars isn't pretty, but it has the same push-pull of repulsion and hypnosis that drives all of Cronenberg's strangest work. There's a disgusted rage at the heart of the film, a fiendish diagnosis of a culture addicted to exhibition. Opening in the wake of the Oscars, Hollywood's annual show of self-congratulation, Maps to the Stars goes down like proper poison.

Maps To The Stars (B)

Directed by David Cronenberg. R (strong disturbing violence and sexual content, graphic nudity, language and drug use). 111 mins. At the Look Cinemas.