"Faster than a speeding bullet!" barked the opening of 1950s TV smash The Adventures Of Superman. If only that were true of the man who played the Man of Steel; a speeding bullet left George Reeves' brains on his bedroom wall.

Still shrouded in mystery, Reeves' death provides the focus for this confident debut feature from director Allen Coulter whose efficient handling of dark wit and drama on The Sopranos is much in evidence here.

Spanning events either side of the fatal gunshot, the story presents Reeves (Affleck) as a square-jawed ham plucked from obscurity ("You're talking to the guy that defended Camelot with a cardboard sword") to become America's favourite hero.

But George is introduced as a naked corpse. Unhappy with the LAPD's suicide verdict, his mother (Lois Smith) hires low-rent private eye Louis Simo (Brody) to do some poking around.

After exposing shoddy police work at the scene and upsetting his ex-wife and son, Simo makes more enemies when he discovers that George had his own sugar-mummy in Toni (Lane), the unfulfilled wife of MGM's menacing bigwig Eddie Mannix (Hoskins, doing a meaner version of his Who Framed Roger Rabbit role).

Toni and her husband would be suspects in anyone's book, but Simo's not counting out George's disdainful fiancée Leonore (Prison Break's Tunney). Wouldn't she inherit whatever the washed-up ham left behind?

Unlike Brian De Palma's headless-chicken take on The Black Dahlia case, Hollywoodland provides more believable speculations on another Tinseltown scandal by virtue of superior characterisation and moral shading.

On the downside, first-timer Paul Bernbaum's script could have left some of the clichés off Simo's down-at-heel CV. The ex-family subplot makes for a laboured and unnecessarily sentimental final act.

But Brody does good noir and, as portrayed by the unfailingly impressive Lane, Toni is no two-dimensional femme fatale but an insecure and possessive yet supportive lover whose feelings become trampled beneath George's frustrated ambitions.

And yes, the rumours are true: Affleck is excellent. He manages to make Reeves at once charming and pathetic; the king of primetime whose red-and-blue robes turned into a career strait-jacket.

Foul play or no, his demise was as ironic as it was sad. So much for defending truth, justice and the American Way.

Elliott Noble