Cinephile.

Stanley Kubrick didn't sound as he was expected to sound. Here was one of film's most revered directors, a man who lived in England for decades, a man associated with the highest standards of art and culture ... and he spoke in a thick Bronx accent. That "New Yawk" patois might be the only accent to go unused by John Malkovich in the film Color Me Kubrick, in which he portrays Alan Conway, a real-life gay huckster who in the early '90s passed himself off--for years--as Kubrick.

Conway wasn't all that familiar with the reclusive Kubrick--instead, as embodied by Malkovich's wild performance, he played to people's expectations of what a famous artist should look and sound like. He employed outrageous outfits and an ever-changing accent to convince people that he could be the auteur behind A Clockwork Orange and The Shining. The voice changed depending on the con: a low, sulky U.K. accent if Conway wanted to bed a boy half his age; an outsize American amalgam if he wanted to fool an investor into giving him some money. Sometimes the brazen Conway would even change accents midconversation, each one wilder than the last, knowing that his marks were too dazzled by refracted celebrity to notice.

Accents, costumes, a real person to play--this is a plum part for any actor, and Malkovich makes the most of it. Whether he's swanning around in a feathered robe or cooing confidentially that "the trouble with Marlon is he thinks he's Brando," his Conwaycum-Kubrick is too ingratiating to resist. You might not expect a movie concerned with Stanley Kubrick to be a larky cream puff, but thanks to Malkovich, Color Me Kubrick is just that.

Conway isn't the only put-on artist hitting screens this season. In Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax, Richard Gere plays Clifford Irving, an author notorious for selling a made-up "autobiography" of Howard Hughes to McGraw-Hill. This is another true story, though Hallstrom tidies things up considerably. Gone are Irving's two kids and his mistresses in a bid to make our antihero's selfish actions seem more sympathetic. Where Color Me Kubrick takes a real story and makes it even more outrageous, The Hoax colors strictly inside the lines.

For a while, though, the film gets by on Gere's bluster and the sheer audacity of the scare. Irving and accomplice Richard Suskind (Alfred Molina) banked on the fact that Hughes--like Kubrick, a notorious recluse--was far too private to ever publicly denounce their book as fiction.

The two drew all their "interviews" from preexisting resources and sprinkled the text with any quirks and speech patterns they could glean from Hughes's long-ago public appearances. While it all seemed a little odd to the publishers, Hughes was a little odd too, and thus Irving's story seemed just weird enough to be true.

The trouble is that when Irving's charade begins to collapse, so does the movie. There are heavy-handed attempts to suggest that by channeling Hughes, Irving took on the man's crusading personality--that his ruse had somehow ennobled him. Can't he just be a shyster with an outrageous idea? The more significance the film tries to heap on Irving, the blander he becomes, and the stakes are inflated so artificially high (at the end of the film Irving is battling Nixon) that the character seems almost forced into telling lies, which robs the story of its real-life ingenuity. Conman stories ought to work because, despite the damage done by the ruse, we marvel at the nerviness on display. I wish The Hoax had more of it.