Infamous covers the composition of Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood, which is about the murder of the Clutter family in their farmhouse in Holcomb, Kansas in 1959 and the two men who committed it. That is, it covers the same period of the author's life as Bennett Miller's Capote (2005), but Infamous is not only the more entertaining movie, it's the more sophisticated, and the more emotional, as well. It's a brilliantly variegated work, and the best American movie I've seen so far this year.

Dan Futterman's script for Capote took an ingenious, icily ironic view of its main character. It did not, however, have a dramatic shape to match. It was a simple heroic romance: In Cold Blood was the masterpiece Capote was born to write and every experience was part of the ordeal of achieving that quest. Capote showed a fearless wit about its writer protagonist, but it didn't dare to be funny, probably because the moviemakers' view of In Cold Blood was so reverential it tended to flatten everything, even their best ideas. Capote had a self-seriousness that was indistinguishable from dullness, though it probably accounted for the praise the movie received. It was an "intelligent" and "literate" movie about a flamer who became fascinated with a psycho.

Infamous makes for a wilder ride: the first thing it gets right is how an effeminate little imp like Capote could have been a celebrity and socialite in the '50s at all. There was something poisonous about Philip Seymour Hoffman's Capote, which made sense as an interpretation of character but did not suggest how he gathered his swans (who were mostly absent from that movie). Hoffman was also too careful an actor to convey the heedlessness of Capote's self-promotion.

Jones plays him really gay and Capote's social life as the ideal lady's companion makes perfect sense. (He loves clothes, gossip, dining out, entertaining, but makes no sexual demands, as a straight man would, and doesn't compete for straight male attention, as a straight woman would.) There are certain American celebrities, such as Madonna (the Kabbalah mystic, hapless horsewoman, and Third-World baby shopper), who could have stepped straight out of Vile Bodies or Black Mischief. That's how the Englishman Jones plays Capote, as a madcap, traffic-stopping character.

Capote goes to Kansas to gather data to support the thesis he has already formulated about the murder while still in New York (and pitched to New Yorker editor William Shawn). He's accompanied by his childhood friend Nelle Harper Lee (Sandra Bullock), and McGrath makes much clearer than Miller did how Nelle helps Truman by moderating his approach to the traumatized townspeople. Capote runs up to them in his long fur-lined coat and scarf and lisps out questions about the "gruesome" killings. He not only turns people off but is taken for an obstreperous and bizarre woman.