This is a Coen brothers movie, which means I don’t trust my judgment about it. So often, I’ll watch one of their movies and be like “well, I normally like their stuff, but this one just doesn’t really hang together, minor effort at best.” And then later, its most memorable scenes will take up residence in my head, and before you know it, I’ve got that one firmly ensconced in my mental canon.

That said: This one just doesn’t really hang together, minor effort at best. Our protagonist is a pseudo-intellectual left-wing playwright (John Turturro) convinced that he is the chronicler of the great unwashed masses, whom he has never met or talked to in any way. He gets an invite to go to Hollywood, which he takes because he is very poor and needs money, and is tasked with writing “a wrestling picture,” which apparently was a genre of B-movie that used to exist?

He turns for assistance to another writer on staff, a great novelist whose works inspired Turturro; but turns out that the great novelist isn’t all he’s cracked up to be in a number of ways; and meanwhile, the playwright starts falling for his wife.

If the movie had stayed focused on this triangle plus his growing conflict with the studio, it would have been more coherent, but also less interesting, than it is. But the Coens throw in more elements, like a creepy hotel that seems to be borderline supernatural (with slimy, mucusy wallpaper that keeps falling off the walls) and — especially — John Goodman’s character, who is in the hotel room next door. Goodman starts out as a kind of echo of the faux-populist theme, a working man who is invisible to Turturro even as the playwright is boasting about his own populist credentials. But by the end of it, he’s taken on a wholly different role in the movie, and it’s his actions that drive the events of the very weird — and tbh unsatisfying — ending.

Roger Ebert, in his contemporaneous review, says that the whole thing is a parable for the rise of Nazism, which… uh, maybe? It’s certainly not a reading that jumped out at me as I watched it, but I guess I can see it.

At any rate, even if it doesn’t fully work for me (as of now; check back in five years for a more fully formed verdict), it’s still easily interesting enough to be worth watching.