When Capote does make it into the home of Alvin Dewey (Jeff Daniels), the KBI detective in charge of the investigation — on Christmas day, no less — he seems to be compounding his errors by exulting in his love of shawls, particularly the one given to him by Jennifer Jones during the shoot of Beat the Devil. But in fact his name-dropping impresses his hosts and the other guests, and he's in. He can be as camp as he likes because he will always be the man who beat Humphrey Bogart at arm-wrestling.

McGrath's first two movies as writer-director were the unfortunate literary adaptations Emma (1996) and Nicholas Nickleby (2002). His approach wasn't complacent but he got more of the texture than the depth of the source works, which create specific high expectations. Plimpton's book, a chronological sequence of interview excerpts, gives McGrath much more freedom and he comes into his own. His comic sense in Infamous—which has the sparkle if not perhaps the flawless hardness of the starburst-cut Hooker Diamonds—reminds you that he is the man who co-wrote Woody Allen's Bullets Over Broadway (1994).

There are a number of things that McGrath can't do, or maybe didn't have the time or money to do. The scenes involving the swans — Weaver as Paley (wife of CBS founder William S. Paley), Hope Davis as Slim Keith, the ever-amusing Juliet Stevenson as a nutcrackery Diana Vreeland, and Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli — feature both awkward deliveries and staging. You can't be sure whether the waxworks quality is intended (maybe that's what it's like to socialize with a vitrine's worth of style-setting mannequins) or the scenes simply failed to come to whatever life was intended.

In addition, McGrath includes "interviews" with actors playing the sources from whom Plimpton gathered his material. The information is interesting, and Stevenson gives her moments a charge, but the technique is a bit strained. (The witnesses in Warren Beatty's Reds — Henry Miller, Rebecca West, Adela Rogers St. John, Hamilton Fish, Will Durant, et al. — were so effective because they were the actual people who had been on the scene at the time the story took place.) As good as Bullock is, for instance, we're too conscious of the sad "truth" of Nelle's comments about Capote and literary fame in America.

The movie, however, is keyed to Jones's imaginative and physical energy, which thoroughly justify McGrath's approach, and the awkwardness can't muffle what the director and his star are on to here. That gets the movie only so far, however. There's still the way Capote gets details even the police don't know from Perry Smith (Daniel Craig), the scarier of the two killers, and the effect of Capote's methods and that information on how we feel about his artistic enterprise. McGrath, Jones, and Craig use this relationship to push the movie to another level.