What Just Happened?

A movie producer (Robert De Niro) grapples with professional and personal associates: an iron-willed studio head (Catherine Keener), an irascible star (Bruce Willis, as himself), a self-righteous director (Michael Wincott), a discontented ex-wife (Robin Wright Penn). Art Linson’s script fictionalizes his own Hollywood memoir, plucking incidents here and there to dramatize the thousand natural shocks that movie-colony flesh is heir to. Director Barry Levinson marshals a high-pedigree cast (Stanley Tucci, John Turturro, Kristen Stewart and Sean Penn are around, too) in a mordant satire that echoes (with less resonance) Hollywood movies from Robert Altman’s The Player all the way back to the original A Star Is Born. It’s mild fun, and feels authentic, but the final answer to the movie’s title is “not much.”