In The Aviator Leonardo DiCaprio is at a huge disadvantage because of how wide the gap is between the Hughes romance and the buggily prosaic obsessive-compulsive disorder. His performance has two modes, burning and burnt-out. The men's room scene in which Hughes is so paralyzed by his fear of contamination he can't hand a towel to a man on crutches makes the hopelessness of the movie's conception plain. How can they not play this for comedy of some sort? But they'd never dare to because that might make Hughes seem merely human which would really deflate the romance blimp.

The Aviator is certainly lively, with guest-star villains Alec Baldwin as Juan Trippe and Alan Alda in impressively unemphatic form as Senator Brewster, and a number of Hughes's famous squeezes, including Cate Blanchett overdoing it as a Katharine Hepburn who is too constantly being "Katharine Hepburn." Among the ladies, I preferred Kate Beckinsale as Ava Gardner, who comes across as a character first and the identifiable celebrity only incidentally. When she rejects Hughes's marriage proposal by purring, "You're too crazy for me," I knew just how she felt. He's too crazy for everybody connected with the movie.

To be fair, the triumph of conventional romance over naturalism may be unavoidable in biopics because we want to see the "inspiring" life story of someone only if we've romanticized him as the vessel of his achievements. We may not want the facts to be misrepresented but we don't want the glory to be dimmed, either. (Read Stanley Crouch's obituary for Ray Charles in Slate to see what I mean: "Charles was one of those special few who expands the democratic experience by proving that neither color nor a handicap mean that one is less a man...." How do you dramatize that sort of reverence?) The day-to-day man, on the other hand, was a real person and can be recreated only with the detail-by-detail approach of naturalism.

The generic challenge, then, is always to see the flawed human in the hero and vice versa and to acknowledge his achievements while keeping them in perspective. Of course, it's extremely hard for a movie structured as romance to present what we would think of as a psychologically accurate portrait, no matter how many factual details are included. Pictures like Ray and Kinsey and The Aviator give us too much reality for the hagiographic approach to function but aren't truly committed to replicating what actually was, either. They don't lie about their heroes' well-publicized warts but they present a softened view of the warty men in the glow of their accomplishments, as if actual men could be synonymous with what they have come to mean to us. (I think a better approach would have to be much more offhanded about the subject's talent and fame, without the storybook sense of awe. Kinsey comes closest.)