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There's a budding love story between Marla and Frank that's complicated by their upbringing: Marla was raised Baptist and lives with her mom, who's peppy and friendly but extremely judgmental, while Frank is nearly as strict a Methodist. It's also complicated by the looming attentions of Hughes, who treats all his young starlets like members of a sheik's harem but doesn't have sex with any of them. In fact the one thing the actresses have in common with Hughes employees is that they've never met Hughes. Hughes communicates with them mainly by phone. Sometimes he calls them up out of nowhere and launches into a very long monologue or starts berating them over some breach of protocol or perceived slight. On payday he has a clipboard lowered from a window of his office while actresses stand down on the street and sign for their paychecks.

Nobody knows what kind of movie Hughes is making or what kind of talent would allow a young actress to win the lead role. And nobody dares ask Hughes for additional details. Everyone who works for Hughes speaks of him the way acolytes speak of a religious figure or cult leader—he's always "Mr. Hughes" even in conversations that occur in complete privacy. Most of the film's characters are distinguished by this mix of slightly bland innocence and eerie fervor. 

Marla and Frank keep circling each other, and soon Frank is pretty clearly in love with her. As for Marla, well, it's hard to say; she's tough to read. Eventually Marla does get to meet Mr. Hughes and something like a romance begins; the extreme difference in their ages gives the affair a creepiness that's exacerbated only by Marla's startling ruthlessness (she's genuinely smitten by Hughes but also trying to gain advantage over the competition) and by Hughes' desperate, often heartbreaking loneliness. He's locked himself up inside a vault of his own devising, and it's hard to tell if his obvious mental illness was always this bad or if it was amplified by the strange dictatorial behavior that his money and success allowed him to indulge. 

Shot by Beatty's regular cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and co-written by Beatty, "Rules Don't Apply" is a big production that carries itself with the nonchalance of a much smaller one. There are signature, dialogue-free Warren Beatty music montages that cut off abruptly, a soundtrack of vintage pop and swing tunes and classical cues (including a snippet of Mahler's Ninth,which you'd think would be way too heavy for a film this light) and a wild ride in Hughes's wooden airplane The Spruce Goose. The movie runs more than two hours but has about as much plot as one of those inconsequential "programmers" that used to run on the second half of a double bill in the 1930s, and the tone is at once extremely cynical (mainly about how Hollywood entices and exploits starry-eyed young people from other places) and nostalgic for the way things used to be. The cars, the skirts, the heels, the fedoras, the cigarettes and cocktails, the vintage prewar architecture (some of it recreated digitally) all bespeak a longing to go back a specific period in the industry that forged Beatty as a young man, and that his innovative work as both writer and producer (especially on 1967's "Bonnie and Clyde") would help dismantle. 

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