If satire is what closes on Saturday night, “Maps to the Stars” might never have opened at all—and it almost didn’t. David Cronenberg’s new film, from a script by Bruce Wagner, was in danger of going straight to video on demand, but it's also in limited theatrical release. It's an inside-Hollywood shock drama, laced with acerbic parody, that seems drawn from a pre-“Player” bottom drawer of dusty revelations about what movie people are really like.

The story is centered on two actors. Havana Segrand (played by Julianne Moore) is a middle-aged actress whose career is on the downturn, and she is desperate to jump-start it by playing her own late mother, Clarice Taggart (Sarah Gadon), in a movie about the making of "Stolen Waters," Clarice's famous film from the nineteen-seventies. Benjie Weiss (Evan Bird) is a thirteen-year-old star just out of rehab, and is also scrambling to reëstablish himself, in the sequel to his franchise film, "Bad Babysitter."

An arrogant child actor? An aging actress desperate for a part? Merciless decisions made by tough business people? Actors worrying about their looks? Dishing behind the scenes? Sleeping with people who can help? Making nice to rivals while wishing them death? I doubt that Cronenberg is any more shocked, shocked than his viewers to learn that such things go on in Hollywood. Which is why, as tired as Wagner's satire is, Cronenberg's way with it is an intermittent but brilliant display of the essence of his artistry, and of the art of direction as such.

This pallid story draws its ferocious tone less from the fury of willful people than from the literalization of a flip metaphor: the idea that the movie industry is incestuous. Benjie is a son-of, and Havana is a daughter-of. Besides being a son of a bitch and a daughter of darkness, they are, respectively the son of parents who are also brother and sister (a rich and famous self-help author, played by John Cusack, and his sister/wife, who appears not to work and is played by Olivia Williams), and the daughter of a famous actress with a star plaque in the sidewalk, who abused Havana, sexually and otherwise, in childhood.

Gone is the democratic absolutism of Hollywood's early days ("What I like ain't worth a cent; what audiences like is worth a million"). This is the Hollywood of the second and third generations, dynasties of free-thinking genius and devoted craftsmanship, of obscene privilege and ravenous entitlement. "Maps" shows these children as at once spoiled and deprived and destroyed, drowning in the void of the-sky's-the-limit and nothing-is-ever-enough, consuming their past to feed their dreams, or, to invert a phrase from "Histoire(s) du Cinéma," burning their reality to heat their imagination.

In effect, the protagonists have an excess of backstory and too little story; and the hyphen between Havana and Benjie, as well as the link between the past and the present, is a character who is Cronenbergian in her essence: Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), Benjie's eighteen-year-old sister, who has just checked herself out of the institution in which she was confined for attempting to set the family's house on fire. Agatha, who is schizophrenic, was her own sole victim—her stomach, arms, and face are scarred. (She always wears long gloves.) She arrives in Los Angeles to reunite with her brother, which is a tough task—her father, Stafford Weiss (Cusack), the pompous and aggressive self-help guru, has essentially disowned her and barred her from seeing him—with a restraining order on the way. So Agatha, having already gotten her Hollywood "in" (an online friendship with Carrie Fisher), becomes Havana's personal assistant, or "chore whore," and thereby gains access to the studio where Benjie is shooting.

Putting aside the plot hole (Havana hires a personal assistant and doesn’t Google her?), Cronenberg is the director of physical squeamishness, of pushing past squeamishness and into the deep psychological waters that the surface of squeamishness conceals, of the mental side of the body. Agatha tests squeamishness from the start, with her beauty slightly marred and her gloves and neck-high dresses hinting at more terrifying wounds that are still unseen.

Wagner's crude but strong metaphor of the price of incest, the mythological madness visited on violators by an avenging spirit of their own making, is worked out with reprocessed and familiar narrative details, but the banality of these details is masked, even overridden, by Cronenberg's controlled eye and sense of mood—his rendering of intimate violence with apocalyptic grandeur. The director conjures the eerie chill of a hermetic world of sleekly channelled feedback, of smooth and luminous surfaces that silently screech and buzz with monstrously overloaded self-amplifications.

Some of Cronenberg's most stunning and subtle directorial touches are mere framings—the off-center compositions that put Benjie toward the edge of the frame, not commanding his space by looking across the frame but aiming his gaze out his own side of the frame, as if he's both being pushed out of place and is desperate to leave it. The effect is doubly distorting—the perky, groomed boy suddenly looks squeezed, even deformed, by the pressure of an unflattering, psychologically revealing image.

That's where Cronenberg achieves the height of his art—as a director of the body. The best moments in "Maps" present acting as a business of the body, involving care of the body, toning the body—not just through plastic surgery, exercise, and makeup but also through the invocation of the body, the spiritualization of the body, the emotionalization of the body. Cronenberg films actors pushing through beauty and shape toward expressivity, pliability, vulnerability without damage—exposure minimizing pain, inner exertion, and recovery; like athletes, but with the added element of subjectivity, of self-revelation.

These notions burst forth in a trio of scenes—two featuring Stafford's quasi-psychoanalytic laying-on of hands in sessions with Havana, and another showing her receiving a facial massage. The latter, especially, has a terrifying power. Havana is at home, receiving the massage, and under the masseuse's gentle influence her face seems to become a living death mask.

These scenes remind me of some reading from college, Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 work of medieval history, “The King’s Two Bodies”: the king has a physical body, a “body natural,” which, like all physical bodies, deteriorates, ages, gets sick, and dies. But the spiritual body—what Kantorowicz calls “the king’s superbody or body politic”—is essentially immortal. I don't know what Kantorowicz thought about the cinema, but movie actors have two bodies as well, and the immortality of a youthful and perfected image lays a curse on the vulnerable and changing flesh, and pushes actors toward ever more reckless self-transformations that are self-preservations, a quest for the ideal self of a permanent youth that's more like an embalming.

The exalted transfigurations of these moments in Cronenberg's film highlight all the more the inadequacy of the drama. "Maps" is a movie about Hollywood in which moviemaking itself isn’t shown—a strange omission, given that Havana is, at one stage of the action, hard at work on a movie that keeps her on set, she says, for fourteen hours a day. In "Maps," making movies means making deals, and what happens during the shoot is beside the point—whereas, in fact, that's where the truly miraculous transformations and revelations occur.

Cronenberg and Wagner have composed a story with its condescension built in—they give the impression of filming filmmakers less talented than themselves, and don't seem willing to give the art form itself its due. They're too busy venting about the industry and its madness to present, even grudgingly, its glory, even as Cronenberg himself works some of that wonder himself. He keeps his tricks hidden behind the curtain and, instead, seeks revenge.

The turning point of the story is Agatha going off her meds—flushing them down the toilet and declaring, “Liberty.” (She's quoting a translation of a poem by Paul Éluard that crops up throughout the film.) What results is a series of unhinged emotional reactions that, in the film’s context, come off as true, sincere, normal, even rational—i.e., non-Hollywood—responses to Hollywood’s offenses, aggressions, transgressions. It's the movie of a mainly bound Prometheus declaring that, uninhibited by the industry's inbred monsters and vulgar hacks, a mighty cinematic liberty would flourish, as would his own. In an age of independent filmmaking and local heroes, it comes off as sour grapes too long fermenting.