“CAPOTE”: Saw it on Saturday with a friend. Verdict: a strange movie, with flaws in unexpected places.

The basic thing is that it’s about Truman Capote researching and writing (and promoting) In Cold Blood, his 1965 account of the murder of a small-town Kansas family; and either you think, Whoa, must see now! or, …And? The movie doesn’t work hard to shift people from category B to category A–characters talk about how revolutionary the book’s style is, how it will change the way people write and how journalism gets done, but even though this actually turned out to be true you don’t get a sense from the movie of why or how. If you aren’t interested in this story already, I don’t know that the movie would make you interested. That’s okay by me, because I was already fascinated with the story. So anyway, let’s say you are already interested, for whatever reason. Does the movie work?

Partly no: This might be the first movie I’ve ever seen with good writing, great acting, and intrusively bad direction. How does that combination occur? The music is aggressively awful, saccharine and cliched. (So are the end titles.) The cuts are jarring and purposeless, sometimes even misleading the audience to focus on the wrong thing in a scene. Grr.

There’s also a major writing problem: Although we do get a strong, and fairly subtle, sense of all the elements that drew Capote to the Clutter family killings once he knew a lot about them, I didn’t get a sense of what made the first impression, what made the story click with him. Eh, I’m not sure that’s a problem that can be solved, now that I think about it: I don’t want armchair psychoanalysis of the dead, so some level of opacity in Capote’s motivations will necessarily remain. Must think more whether there was a better way to handle this question though.

But partly yes: Capote is brilliantly written–egotist, self-deceiver, genius, user. And Philip Seymour Hoffman is clearly having a great time with the role. He was terrific. Harper Lee, wonderfully played by Catherine Keener, gets the fun role of Capote-deflater. They have a lot of chemistry together. And it’s an inherently fascinating story. In the end, I was really glad I saw this, even though the music and editing problems grated. You should go!