Peter Bogdanovich remains one of America’s best contemporary filmmakers, responsible for popular works (The Last Picture Show, What’s Up Doc?, Mask) and vastly underrated ones (Daisy Miller, Texasville, Saint Jack). For eight years there have been no features; younger audiences know him, if at all, for his shrink role in HBO’s The Sopranos. The Cat’s Meow, from a play by Steven Peros, is Bogdanovich’s happy return to the big screen, an often splendid lesson in the lost directorial arts of framing and camera movement and (Robert Altman excepted) ensemble acting.

There’s an interesting story, too, though some will find it an archaic one. The Cat’s Meow is a Hollywood-gossip whodunit that attempts to figure out what really happened that fine day in 1924 when publisher William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann) and a crew of movie people went out to sea on his yacht and came back with a body. The deceased was studio producer Thomas Ince (Cary Elwes); among the famous gathered on the boat were gossip queen Louella Parsons (Jennifer Tilly), comedian Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), and Hearst’s actress mistress, Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst). Elwes is perhaps too pretty-boy for the hard-bargaining Ince and Izzard too pudgy and unexercised for the agile Little Fellow; and the film runs low on pizzazz in its final minutes. But Herrmann’s Hearst is persuasively lovestruck about his young girlfriend, and Dunst proves a dimple-cheeked charmer as Davies. The Cat’s Meow rebuts Orson Welles’s skewed view of their relationship as hateful and barren — which is what we see in their fiction counterparts, Charlie Kane and Susan Alexander, in Citizen Kane.