I keep trying to launch into this commentary from a persnickety point of view because certainly, I Love Your Work, the sophomore directorial effort by actor Adam Goldberg, is not without flaws. But each time I set off to examine one of them, I find that it is exactly the flaws that drew me into this dark, twisted journey. Ron Howard this ain’t. What it succeeds at exposing is not the heady glamour of celebrity life we see splashed on the covers of People and Us Weekly, but relentless, boisterous, explosions of idolatry that makes one expect the ritual sacrifice that would seem ready to befall its idol. And in this story, it eventually does.

Gray Evans, incisively portrayed by Giovanni Ribisi, is a superfamous movie star. His relationship of one year with glitzy celebrity wife, Mia (Franka Potente), is starting to fray at the edges as Gray’s tolerance for the rabid intensity of his adoring public wears thin. It throws him into pervasive musings of bygone days, and Shana, his former—and now idealized—love comes to him in daydreams as a winning Christina Ricci. When he meets John, a young aspiring filmmaker, played earnestly by Joshua Jackson—who both admires and envies Gray for his success—Gray begins to melt into some kind of wistful obsession regarding his own romanticized perception of John’s starving-artisthood. Ah, the good old daze.

Gray also magnifies the attempts of Elvis Costello to persuade Mia to star in his film to conspiratorial proportions, alienating Mia. The seeds of these stories grow tangled roots until the only escape Gray’s shattering psyche can devise is to literally stalk John—whose relationship with the fetching visual artist, Jane (Marissa Coughlan), has become a metaphor for Gray’s lost innocence.

Yes, people, this is a lot to cram onto one canvas of pop culture celebrity, especially when we’re overly spoon-fed the ego and shallow excess of our celluloid idols in rapid fire sound bytes from every cable outlet. But I have to say, from the French New Wave-y opening sequence, throughout the constant assault of paparazzi flares and shouts, I fell into Gray’s desperate abyss and rode the train, unable to pull the emergency chord and save myself from what couldn’t possibly end well. There are a lot of disquieting shock cuts that batter us with the blinding clack and pop of cameras and grabby crowds. The super-saturated cinematography and claustrophobic mis en scene gets a little too reminiscent of Aronofsky’s paranoia-packed Pi at times (a film I both love and find annoying). But I have to confess that it all worked for me.

The only complaint I have, really, is with Potente, of whom I am normally a fan. If she had managed to cough up a little initial tenderness, or, for that matter, even take notice of Ribisi’s fearful desperation, I would have found their drowning marriage less annoying. Moreover, it would have made Gray’s undoing all the more poignant; but she seemed as shallow as the world that sucked him dry. Otherwise, performances dazzled: Jason Lee’s portrayal of Gray’s quirky/creepy stalker, and Vince Vaughn’s irrepressibly self-serving (and hilariously spelled) character, Stiev, were extra yummy. Overall, I enjoyed being swallowed up in the decadence and self-delusion of a very broken guy who had everything most of us are hoping for and dreaming of, while finding it all too-too much to bare. Abandon all hope, ye narcissistic glory hounds! The road to excess leads … oh, who am I kidding, I still wanna be rich and famous.

Grade: A solid B