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'Rules Don't Apply' meanders to the end Warren Beatty directs and plays Howard Hughes in "Rules Don't Apply." 20th Century Fox Thursday Dec 8, 2016 at 12:01 AM By Chris Honoré for Revels Rules Don’t Apply; 104min; Rated PG-13   Writer/director Warren Beatty, who has been absent from moviemaking for almost 20 years, insists that his new movie, “Rules Don’t Apply,” is “not a Howard Hughes film.” He would be right, sort of, but he would also be wrong. But first things first: the movie is an attractive mess, meaning it’s a romance, a weak biopic, a film about the eccentric Howard Hughes (off his meds most of the time, except for one lucid scene), and Hollywood in 1959. There is no plot; instead, it’s just a potpourri of scenes, strung together, which have a certain old-time movie charm but never cohere. Hughes (Beatty) is a reclusive billionaire who plays with airplanes, dabbles in real estate, and lures a stable of starlets to Hollywood to be at his beck and call. All are promised screen tests, given acting lessons, while nurturing that luminous fantasy of becoming a movie star. One is a Baptist beauty queen from a small town in the east named Marla Mabrey (Lily Collins). She arrives in Lotus Land with her skeptical, protective mother (Annette Bening), and is put up in a lovely house with a pool and given acting lessons, all on Howard’s nickel. She is also assigned a driver, Frank Forbes (Allen Ehrenreich), an aspiring entrepreneur, young and eager to get close to Hughes and sell him on a business proposal. Meanwhile. he chauffeurs Marla to her appointments and, of course, begins to fall in love with her. The rules, however are strict: the drivers must never get involved with any of the starlets. Both Marla and Frank are eager to meet Hughes, though for very different reasons. Both wonder why the man is a recluse and even when they finally do cross paths with H.H., they are slow to understand that he is not just eccentric and rich, but eccentric and fundamentally batty. And it takes a long time for them to stop and figure out that Hughes’ journey can never be theirs because he is beyond reach or rationality. Actually, Beatty, who is now 79 (it’s been a long time since “Splendor in the Grass” or even “Bonnie and Clyde”), gives Hughes a certain endearing quality and even manages to give the man some style. But he avoids two central questions: what’s driving Howard away from people, and what’s driving his cohort of go-fors toward him, other than his fame and money, since he can be completely unpredictable, unavailable and even abusive. So we have two Hollywoods in this film. One that created magic in movie after movie and one in which vulnerable, striving people with dreams are exploited. It takes way too long to get to the end of “Rules Don’t Apply,” but at the least it does have a right ending.