Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that we cannot experience death because death is not an event in life. But then Wittgenstein never had to sit through this unbearable new film from Warren Beatty, his first in 15 years, co-written, produced and directed by its star, Warren Beatty, who may well be affecting a kind of kinship with his subject, the crazy but allegedly lovable billionaire recluse Howard Hughes.

Beatty may also like the low lighting Hughes favoured. It’s a plodding, plonking, clonking, clanking vanity project, watching which is like drowning in suet or being alone for two hours in the kind of airless hotel room that Hughes reputedly holed up in. It is a lumpily unformed, unwieldy film with a kind of picturesque Old Hollywood setting that Woody Allen could have dashed off in six months. But I think even Woody Allen would not have awarded himself a sex scene with his twentysomething directee. Yeeeeeshh. And to crank up the emotion, Beatty keeps slathering the adagietto from Mahler’s fifth all over the soundtrack, often at deafening volume.

Alden Ehrenreich – recently so terrific in the Coens’ Hail, Caesar! – is lifeless and boring in the fictional role of Frank, one of Hughes’s army of drivers, employed to chauffeur around the pert but bewildered wannabe female stars that Hughes signed on retainer contracts, set up in apartments, and kept waiting around for the promised screen test. One of these is fresh-faced Baptist Marla Mabrey, played by Lily Collins, who is every bit as lost in this film as Ehrenreich. Defying the company rule that Hughes’ employees are not allowed to date, the pair naturally fall in love, but then Hughes takes an intrusive interest in their lives, and in tandem with this creepy development, Beatty himself takes a much, much bigger role in the film than had hitherto seemed likely. We had, to paraphrase Carly Simon, been betting the film wasn’t about him. We were wrong. It’s an unendurable exercise in narcissism.