Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia is a broken film, one about Los Angeles, detective movies, noir nostalgia, the moving pictures, and the obsession of all the above over murder, sexuality, sanity, and understanding. It is a revisionist neo-noir, which is not a redundant statement, for De Palma’s film is undercutting pristine productions like L.A. Confidential by way of its own sloppy, inconsistent, and dissatisfying result, a hollow and hollowing film that seems to call the bluff of the attraction of everything it is—or at least tries to be, and fails—and its kind represents. These latter qualities are what make The Black Dahlia all the more interesting—its failings—because sometimes a troubled production and an awkward final product can leak fascination from all its odd holes, bulges, and depressions. The film is ostensibly an adaptation by Josh Friedman of the James Ellroy novel by the same name (which I have not read), about the personal lives of two cops who are assigned to the grisly dismemberment and murder of a wannabe starlet, one Elizabeth Short (Mia Kirshner), dubbed the “Black Dahlia” by the press. What it really is is a mess, but an absorbing one.

To begin with, there is apparent a fundamental distrust between the script and the direction. The former tries its best to cram in an amount of narrative detail and intricate convolution that strives to exceed the similarly intertwined plot of L.A. Confidential, another Ellroy adaptation that superficially shares much in common with De Palma’s film, but goes for an earnestness and classiness of pastiche and nostalgia that the newer film only ends up aping grotesquely, inadequately, and perhaps parodically. The Dahlia tale being a moral one, of new detective Dwight “Bucky” Bleichert (Josh Hartnett) immersing himself way above his head in the labyrinthine corruptions, interconnectivity, destabilization, and deeply neurotic obsessions of Los Angeles, and always mirrored in his struggle by his veteran partner and best friend, Lee Blanchard (Aaron Eckhart). However, the miscast actors and their abbreviated characters shortchange the sense that these detectives are anything more than creaky stereotypes, ones who in no way are constructed or acted with enough depth to suggest they have such things as morals, as obsessions, and such a thing as, finally, the ability to make a decision like the one to pull a trigger for a reason.

Perhaps the supreme, sometimes baffling, and sometimes subversively carefree and opaque, brittleness of the characters in The Black Dahlia is because Friedman and De Palma bleed them off into their doubles, a regular De Palma motif. Bleichert and Blanchard, whose names even sound and look the same, are the two halves of the Department’s boxing duo, dubbed Fire and Ice, and, are contrasted in the former’s measured simplicity, and the latter in his flaring mania over the Dahlia case. Though they fundamentally disagree throughout the film, by the end the difference between them seems not so large at all, a transference of passion and of interest taking place somewhere along the line. From the female side of things, following a lead that the Dahlia was possibly a lesbian, Bucky begins to shack up with a bisexual heiress who looks like the murdered girl (played by an unexpectedly cast but supremely sensual Hilary Swank), and who herself was slept with the Elizabeth Short because of the similarity. In fact, the only seemingly genuine non-double in the plot’s main line-up is Kay Lake (Scarlet Johansson), the story’s ur-blonde, and Blanchard’s wife and spoils-of-war from a bust where he put away the pimp and kept the prostitute. Kay, friend to both of her “super-cops” is supposed to come between the two, but herself is nothing more than an iconic, gorgeous posing doll: cigarette holder, curled platinum hair, ruby lips, and scars just beneath the clingy sweaters. And as central as Blanchard himself is, as the only friend, mentor, brother, contrast, and body double of Bucky Bleichert, his singular importance in the film, namely his growing obsession and instability over the difficulty of the Dahlia case, is shown in the minimal amount of time through the maximum amount of caricature. Lost in the whirl of the film’s abbreviation is a feel for the pain or reasoning of the obsession, just like how the passion for the original case Bucky and Blanchard were on, about a serial killer who targets young black girls, is swallowed up in the proceedings and overstepped by other interests. Likewise, the Dahlia case itself blurs to the background because Hartnett’s Bucky is just the naïve, squinty-eyed patsy, poor imitation of those compelling detective-suckers like Nicholson’s Jake Gittes, whose myopic eyes are easily strayed by attractive women and conspiratorial side paths. The man gets diverted off-case soon and unforgivably, his faux-Dahlia heiress and her eccentric family distracting from Blanchard’s crumbling home of murder obsession (of the man) and sexual attraction (of the wife). Hartnett the actor, like Eckhart’s near anonymity in the film, is lost in a sea of iconic signifiers that cannot find a suitably solid, stylish place for him, and he is both a detriment to the charisma of the character, and also a strength to the underside of the film, the compelling side, which not only paints Bucky as the fall-guy for Ellory’s corrupting story, the man who awkwardly lurches through layer after layer of Los Angeles and of the movie, but has only a surface grasp of things, of what he figures out but not what they mean.

But then there is the cinematic aspect of the film; the film looks and moves like a slick knife, cutting quick and short, flashing thin, superficial and deadly. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and production designer Dante Ferretti give us luscious images, the colors and lighting of the central women in the film, of Johansson and Swank of are of a desaturated luminosity, of a soft-satin likeness (and later give Kirshner an uncanny sharpness in black and white, especially in the eyes), De Palma’s two-shots and reverses—supremely posed, beautiful—are sensual and iconic, and even Hartnett himself, unexpressive as he is, gets his own pondering visual glory as well, crushed beneath the pressures and confusions around him and impelled by the growing obsessions inside. Even so, it often feels like De Palma is only half invested in the proceedings, for the film is generally missing not just a central cohesion but also the masterful flourishes of cinematic gymnastics that are bafflingly untapped by the current generation of filmmakers but brought to glorious heights as recently as De Palma’s masterpiece from 2002, Femme Fatale. Techniques like split screens, long-takes, first-person camera movement, slow motion, absurd depth of field shots, and, most crucially, the De Palma set-piece, dexterous and delirious staging of complicated, simultaneous action over time (think the train sequence in Mission: Impossible, the stairs scene in The Untouchables, the long-take of Snake Eyes, and other fine examples) are all underused or missing in action. Sometimes the De Palma of old seems to wake up: there is an amazing crane shot towards the film’s beginning that triangulates two crimes in front of the eyes of our sleeping detective, a shot whose clever conflation of murders and motives and meanings blossom by the film’s end; the solitary, lonely and vacuous set-piece of the film is shadowy, abstract, full of unexpected murders and odd humor, and beautifully nebulous; and, crucially, the film’s one long take and also its only first-person point of view shot is used as an introduction to the movie’s on-again-off-again parodic absurdity, here used to introduce the half serious, half camp portrayal of the heiress’ Old Hollywood family, with Fiona Shaw, in a fantastically bizarre performance, as the deranged matriarch.

What is especially odd is for a film that invests so much in the detail of its source novel, the director seems completely uninvested in following the script through. The Black Dahlia serves as one of those nexus films, where the center being or meaning is an empty gaping hole of labyrinthine vagueness and obfuscation, a dangerous, mysterious motivation for a movie (the ultimate example of this film style is Kubrick’s The Shining). There-in lays the movie’s appeal, which up to now seems a generally forgettable hodgepodge. The opening of the film, where Bucky takes a fall in a staged police boxing match is one of a seemingly unending series of barely communicated subplots and submotifs in the film that are swamped under the weight of Bucky’s purple-prose voice-over narration, the script’s pacing urging the film to accelerate onward to the next scene from the novel, and the oppressive pastiche of nostalgia that is the look of the movie. The Black Dahlia murder is at the center of the film and of this nexus, and is understandably unsolved in real life and solved without satisfaction in the film. That is because De Palma uses this mysterious occurrence as the foggy reference point for everything the movie is about, and most importantly, everything the movie is: the Black Dahlia is the insidiousness of dreams, it is Hollywood, it is the detective film, it is the warped or soon-to-be-warped past of these policemen, it is the perverted relationship these men have to their women, it is the nostalgia of Los Angeles, it is the noir conventions, it is the movies.

It is why The Black Dahlia looks so strange: it is not going for the “authenticity” of period neo-noir, nor the glossy simulacrum of something like L.A. Confidential, but rather it is a production of the 1940s and of the detective film that never existed, it is a bastard pastiche far removed from its sources, and retaining only exaggerated echoes of its past. The traces of the time and of the references remain, but they seem strangely out of place and remain unfinished, unfinessed: Johannson’s luscious and unreal haircut and skin color, Hartnett’s shaggy dick countenance so forlorn and unattractive it is pathetic, the endless twist plot revelations that only add flack and noise to the proceedings rather than clarify or conclude, the Mexicans of the Zoot Suit Riots at the film’s opening and the blacks gunned down early on elided completely as entities in the film, the submersion of motivations and of characters way down under their period look, the Dahlia murder itself, the golden widescreen that does nothing to open up Los Angeles but instead gives us lesbian bars looks like posed fashion photography from 2006, and so on and on. It is a fragmented tour of the area, of the genre. One of the central pieces of this black hole at the film’s center are the screen tests Elizabeth Short took before she was killed, ones that look less like a real screen test and more like contemporary reality-T.V. confessionals, De Palma literally off-camera prompting personal answers and emotional reactions from the girl, Mia Kirshner’s eyes shimmering and glowing with unreal intensity. Coming after this is the film’s centerpiece, the opulent, heavily fetishized, and absurdly anachronistic lesbian porn film the Elizabeth Short starred in that looks more cinematically alive and erotic than the entirely of The Black Dahlia. It has a bizarre realness to it all its own, and every single cop in the film seems unable to understand just what it is they are seeing. All we see in the film are the corners, around which lie the answers but around which our droopy protagonist, always far behind the understanding, and far beyond preventing the endless series of murders and culpability in the film, will never round and reveal. Even he retreats to the psychic trauma so profuse through every character in the film, of violent and illicit pasts that fail to change the cynicism and immorality of the lived present. This is a knowing cinema, a rare postmodern film that understands the failings of its own undertaking, and as such becomes a wise critic of all that it itself was originally about.