Back in the olden days, before Superman became the star of his own big-budget movies, a cheesy show called The Adventures of Superman was one of the most popular children's programs on television. Millions of us baby boomers (in those days, we were called "kids") would tie bath towels around our necks and sit in front of our Philco consoles to watch the Man of Steel as he fought for truth, justice and the American way, whatever that was.

We would kill time during the commercials by leaping couches in a single bound or bending licorice in our bare hands. Occasionally, one of us would jump off a garage roof and break an arm, an early warning sign about the dangers of the mass media (in those days, it was called "TV").

Then, in 1959, the star of the Superman show, George Reeves, put a pistol to his head and killed himself. I was 12 years old at the time, and it was my first exposure to what has come to be called irony: Superman was faster than a speeding bullet, but Reeves was not.

"Faster than a speeding bullet," in fact, is what a wise-guy cop says at the death scene that opens Hollywoodland, a movie that re-examines the Reeves story and finds evidence that not only was foul play possible, but that Hollywood is a dark -- not to say noir -- pool of corruption, gossip, sex and murder. It's a dream factory, you might say, and Hollywoodland mines the same territory as Chinatown, right down to the sleazy private eye who gets beaten up and wears the scars throughout the film.

Even the title is similar; it's code for the morally compromised territory between our happy fantasies and the disreputable reality beneath them.

Reeves is both background to the story and its real-life engine. He's played by Ben Affleck, who shares the thick, stolid acting style and the vague good looks of the B-film star. Part of the tragedy of Hollywoodland is that Reeves became typecast as Superman and couldn't get another role -- there's a scene where audiences laugh at his brief appearance in From Here To Eternity because they recognize the TV superhero up there on screen with Burt Lancaster -- but in fact, he was as undistinguished an artist as Affleck. Watch the break-up scene between him and Diane Lane, who plays Toni Mannix, his mistress and wife of MGM executive Edgar Mannix (a chilling Bob Hoskins): Lane's emotional breakdown plays against the brick wall of Affleck's confused disregard. In some ways, it's a perfect performance.

In the movie's interwoven plotting, we jump back and forth in time as Reeves shoots himself in his bedroom, apparently in despair at his dead-end career, while a low-rent private detective named Louis Simo (Adrien Brody) insinuates himself into the case.

Simo is hired by Reeves's mother (Lois Smith) who doesn't believe her son is a suicide, and while at first he's in it for the fast money and a chance at tabloid fame, eventually he becomes engaged in what becomes an actual mystery. "This murder bullshit I've been slinging, I think it might be true," he says.

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