[ Read our review of “White.” ]

McInerney traces such positions to Ellis’s “would-be censors” during the “American Psycho” backlash, which “I think shaped his view down to the present day about political correctness and freedom of expression.”

In the last decade Ellis, now 55, has made headlines more for his outspoken opinions than for any creative output. There was a 2013 tweet, “Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated,” which inspired such furor he issued a formal apology in The Daily Beast. He’s complained about liberals who think he’s a Trump apologist, then defended Kanye West’s conservative sympathies. He was called racist after he claimed “Black Panther” was a sop to Hollywood’s “diversity push.” “Black Twitter is hard-core,” he said.

“Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,” Ellis said. “The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.” He really wishes everyone would just calm down.

In some ways, Ellis himself certainly has. Outside the elevator in his West Hollywood apartment building, holding a bag of garbage to go out, the tall, silver-haired man in a well-worn black polo shirt appeared a far cry from the hell-raising socialite he once was. “I don’t really go to parties anymore,” he said. “I think I’ve outgrown it.”

He’s also outgrown his youthful fatalism about current events, preferring to treat the news cycle as fleeting entertainment rather than the end of the world (“Really, Jared Kushner looks great in a bathing suit”). This flippancy feels like an extension of his blasé tone throughout “White,” which treats politics as mere fodder for stylized soliloquy. The apathy doesn’t necessarily sit well with his peers. “I’m a little puzzled by his disavowal of the liberal coastal elites, since he’s clearly in many ways a card-carrying member,” McInerney said.

Ellis has made it a point to say that he didn’t vote for Trump, and that he in fact warned all along of his menacing power as a celebrity capitalist. While he was writing “American Psycho,” Ellis recalled, “all the guys on Wall Street were reading ‘The Art of the Deal,’ and Trump bothered me enough that I decided to make him Patrick Bateman’s father figure.”