It's a role so juicy any actor could drown in it: Truman Capote, the defiantly swishy, endlessly quotable author of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, who in his day was the most famous writer in America. But Capote comes not to praise its subject, nor to bury him — rather, to dig him up just long enough to drag his name through the mud. Sketched in Stygian hues without wit or insight, it's a portrait of a man so hollow you can barely stand to look at him.

As played by Philip Seymour Hoffman and written by Dan Futterman from Gerald Clarke's biography, Capote is a smug, tone-deaf exploiter who sees the horrific murder of a Kansas family at the heart of In Cold Blood as the ideal opportunity for career advancement. On the train to Kansas, he pays a sleeping-car porter to act the part of a breathless fan for the benefit of his childhood friend Harper Lee (Catherine Keener), who immediately sees through his ruse, thus establishing their relationship in the tidy, telegraphed manner common to Futterman's script. Arriving in small-town Holcomb, he sports an ankle-length camel hair coat and a giant, floppy scarf, and takes a policeman's sardonic query about its provenance at face value: "Bergdorf's," he says, without batting an eye. Considering that Capote was born in New Orleans and raised in rural Alabama, the intimation that he would waltz into a Kansas police station in his Manhattan finery and assume that dropping the New Yorker's name would open doors rather than shut them doesn't strain credulity so much as smash it, instantly establishing that the film will go to any length to assassinate its protagonist's character — and, of course, his profession.

If Capote were less glib, if it weren't filmed in a style that might be called Mid-Autumn Oscar Grab, its criticisms might bear some weight. But its every point is so crushingly obvious that the movie's self-importance begins to seem more offensive than any sin Capote might have committed. After getting the (quite understandable) brush-off from the Holcomb police, Capote and Lee pay a visit to Laura Kinney, a teenage friend of the murdered Clutter girl. Capote uses his own history of childhood trauma to coax the girl to open up, a scene the movie stages so as to accuse Capote of putting himself in front of his subjects. In itself, it's a facile critique of Capote's methods — what writer, or artist, doesn't see the world through his or her own eyes? — but it's reduced to idiocy by the fact that director Bennett Miller demonstrates Capote's self-absorption by duplicating his sin: After a brief introduction, Laura Kinney all but disappears from the scene. Apparently Capote isn't the only one who thinks he's the most fascinating person in the room.

Hoffman extends himself outward only in his scenes with Clifton Collins Jr., who plays accused killer Perry Smith. Collins can't touch Robert Blake's version of Smith in the 1967 film version of In Cold Blood, but he's brooding and desperate enough, and his push-pull jailhouse conversations with Capote finally give Capote some depth. It's clear that Capote sees in Smith a warped reflection of himself, a love object and doppelganger in one. Initially confined in a "woman's cell" in the jailhouse kitchen, Smith sketches in court as the charges against him are read, and he drops words like "affectuated" into the conversation. "The book I'm writing will return him to the realm of humanity," Capote pompously declares, but soon Perry becomes all too human to him; the deeper he gets into writing his book, the more he wants it to end, even as he knows that Smith and his co-conspirator Dick Hickock's execution is the only possible ending. Having previously procured legal help for the killers, he retreats to a Spanish villa with his boyfriend Jack Dunphy (Bruce Greenwood), stops taking calls or answering letters and secretly hopes for their deaths.

This vision of the reporter as bloodsucker is, of course, nothing new. Sandwiched in between the unattainable virtue of Good Night, And Good Luck. 's Edward R. Murrow and the wheedling New Journalism of the upcoming Where the Truth Lies, it's practically fashionable. But where Good Night has convictions and Truth only takes itself too seriously half the time, Capote is a ponderous bore from start to finish, enlivened only by Keener's tongue-clucking Lee. Hoffman's mimicry is impressive, but only noteworthy to those who confuse acting with imitation; if Hoffman gets overdue recognition for it, so much the better, but there are at least a dozen movies in which he's done far superior work. As for Miller, there's nothing embarrassing about his first feature turn, but it's depressing to see how quickly he's gone from the loose-limbed DV of his documentary The Cruise to this ersatz swill. In Cold Blood made a reasonable claim to reinventing long-form journalism. Capote doesn't reinvent a thing.