True lies.

FROM The Great Train Robbery down to Ocean's 11, nothing tickles the moviegoing public like watching someone pull off the perfect crime--and no crime is quite so smooth and glamorous, so free from muss and fuss, as the artful grift. It's a shame, then, that real-life con men tend to be such a sordid lot, winkling widows out of their retirement funds, cozying up to lonely housewives, or seducing middle managers with false promises of Nigerian millions. Most grifter movies are implausible improvements on this less-than-cinematic reality, from Robert Redford and Paul Newman's glamorous turn in The Sting to David Mamet's chilly, hermetic entertainments, where everyone's swindling everyone else.

There are a few true-to-life flim-flam men, though, whose cons are the stuff that films are made of. Frank Abagnale, for instance, spent most of the 1960s putting one (and then another and another) over on banks and airlines, two industries that inspire absolutely nobody's pity, and ended up immortalized by Steven Spielberg and Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can. Just as Abagnale was winding up his career, a writer named Clifford Irving got busy selling a fraudulent "autobiography" of a man he had never met, Howard Hughes, to a mark that was practically begging to be conned: the New York publishing industry. Irving got nearly a million bucks out of the deal, and then a jail sentence when Hughes denounced him as the fraud he was; now he, like Abagnale, has been rewarded with the Hollywood treatment, in Lasse Hallstrom's The Hoax.

I haven't seen many of the much-lauded movies that Hallstrom made in his native Sweden, but I have seen most of the glossy, lousy Oscar bait he churned out for Miramax back when that studio was still run by the award-happy Weinstein brothers, and it's hard to imagine that the man responsible for Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, and The Shipping News could ever make a film worth watching.

The Hoax doesn't redeem these upper-middlebrow embarrassments, but it's at least a mark on the other side of the ledger, offering--for most of its running time, at least--a breezy, buoyant entertainment, one that's shot through with just enough darkness to keep the audience unsettled, but not so much that the film falls victim to self-seriousness.

Hallstrom is served well by a stellar cast, which includes Marcia Gay Harden as Irving's Germanic, hippie wife; Julie Delpy as his wannabe-actress mistress; Alfred Molina as his harried, ingenuous sidekick, Dick Suskind; and Hope Davis, Stanley Tucci, and Zeljko Ivanek as his publishing-industry marks. One of the great delights of the movie is watching the latter three at work, with each actor offering up a different veneer--steely unsentimentality for Davis's editor, corporate slickness for Tucci's publishing baron, pseudo-intellectual pomposity for Ivanek's Life magazine editor-that turns out to conceal the same naked, childish greed beneath.

But it's Richard Gere, playing Irving under the cover of curls and sideburns and a faint New York accent (the better to impersonate a novelist who aspired to the company of Norman Mailer and Philip Roth), who makes the movie go down as smoothly as it does. Gere is an underrated actor who will grow less underrated as his good looks are worn away by age: Like Gene Hackman, he plays the same part nearly every time, but always finds something new in it, and here he takes the smooth-operator role and gives it ragged edges, playing a charmer who's always teetering on the brink of disarray. With Molina's Suskind--tongue-tied, decent, uxorious--as his partner and his foil, Gere leaps from lie to lie, deception to deception, growing ever more outrageous as he realizes that it's precisely his most outrageous claims that convince his marks to take him seriously.

He's in over his head almost from the beginning, but fortunately, it isn't until the third act that the movie finds itself floundering there with him. Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can managed to be both a conman flick and a coming-of-age story, with DiCaprio's Abagnale eventually accepting his punishment as the price of adulthood and finding a surrogate father in the cop who tracked him down. Irving, though, is deep in middle age, too old to learn lessons or new tricks, and so the movie zigs and zags in search of a suitably serious conclusion--now playing up the descent-into-madness angle, as Irving dons a Hughes outfit and half-convinces himself that he really is taking dictation from the billionaire; now suggesting that its protagonist is just a pawn in a decades--old duel between Hughes and Richard Nixon, with Watergate shoehorned in for good measure.

In reality, it's precisely the unseriousness and unimportance of Irving's con that makes most of the movie's running time such fun. If his crime wasn't exactly victimless, neither were his victims seriously hurt: Hughes's reputation was barely dented by the scam (if anything, it added luster to his legend), the money was returned in full, and Irving himself, after spending 17 months in prison, went on to write several bestsellers and retire to Aspen, Colo. It's a story made for Hollywood, with all the thrill of a good crime and none of the unpleasant consequences, and the movie is truest to its source material when it sends its heroes kiting through the country in Irving's new convertible, careless and gleeful, secure in the knowledge that being a con man in America means never having to say you're sorry.