Hollywood loves movies about movies, and especially movies about the people who make movies, and so it’s no surprise that this — about the guy who wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane — got more Oscar nominations than anything else this year.

But it’s such a familiar story. He’s a broken-down alcoholic ne’er-do-well, he partakes cynically in the studio system and it rewards him with money and (minor) success, and then finally he can’t handle his own complicity in hacky bullshit anymore, and he decides to have One Last Big Hurrah where he’ll show them all how noble and integrity-laden he is by, uh, getting revenge on his former patron, William Randolph Hearst. Okay, not the most noble final act ever, but you get the picture.

This isn’t a bad movie. The dialogue is genuinely clever, the black-and-white cinematography looks great (if not as creamily sumptuous as in Roma, Netflix’s other monochromatic Oscar bait), and if the tale is familiar, it’s told well. It’s all quite competently done.

But if it weren’t about movies, it would have been a momentary diversion quickly forgotten, not poised to win a bunch of awards. The real attraction is the behind-the-scenes look at Old Hollywood, to see Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, to see Hearst himself (played excellently by Tywin Lannister) and Marion Davies (played even better by Amanda Seyfried). If you set that to the side, it’s a decent movie, not a great one. Lightly recommended, but also ps only if you’ve seen Citizen Kane, but also pps if you haven’t seen that, why are you even reading movie reviews.