It was the iconoclastic playwright and filmmaker David Mamet that called Hollywood “a sinkhole of depraved venality”, which isn’t a sentiment exclusive to his line of thinking – throughout its storied history, the proverbial Tinseltown has been the subject of a fair amount of brutal indictments, whether from those who were soured by their fifteen minutes of fame, or the many others who failed to achieve even that. One of the many filmmakers that has been able to capture the idea of soullessness, not only through the lens of the film industry but in terms of society as a whole, is Paul Schrader. Throughout his career, Schrader has focused on writing and directing films about various characters that are all divided by profession, identity and even era, but all have one aspect in common: they’re outsiders. Whether by virtue of their own refusal to adhere to socially-mediated standards, or simply because they’ve been ousted from decent society for some reason or another, they situate themselves on the outskirts of what we consider acceptable. Looking into Schrader’s work, his career has been defined by taking complex antiheroes and flawed protagonists and capturing their experiences exploring a world they don’t quite understand – and one of his best films is Auto Focus, a twisted dark comedy that circles back to the Mamet quote and finds itself occupying a peculiar place in terms of the industry, simultaneously celebrating and eviscerating show business in a way that only someone with the dark sense of humour and willingness to dive deep into the roots of the most pitch-black recesses of the human condition like Schrader could’ve accomplished.

There are some days where I consider Auto Focus to be the director’s best work – and today just happens to be one of them. As far as everything else is concerned, this is what any showbusiness satire should aspire to be – blisteringly funny and incredible dark in equal measure, Schrader is not afraid to incite nothing but chaos throughout the film, and with good reason. The story of Bob Crane isn’t one fit for anything less than a deeply unsettling, seriocomic portrait by an artist who has committed the vast majority of his career to these kinds of stories, and easily fits in amongst figures like Travis Bickle, Julian Kaye and Schrader’s own interpretation of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Perhaps not becoming as iconic a figure as any of them (a combination of being based on a real character, and being the protagonist of a well-respected but tragically underseen film), Crane led a fascinating life, one certainly far from being free of scandals, but one suitable for the complex portrait Schrader provides. Never avoiding the deeply unsettling perversions that plagued his life, Schrader’s portrayal of Crane’s fall from grace, as facilitated by his friendship with a sinister video salesman, seems perfectly fitting as subject matter for one of the most disconcerting satires of the early part of the century. It also helps massively that Schrader is a filmmaker that functions most exceptionally when he’s at his most simple – and condensing Crane’s life to a few central narrative threads may seen counterproductive and reductive to the life of a very famous performer, he realized that what compels viewers to care about his story isn’t his life, but rather his demise – and since it would’ve been inappropriate to reduce the film to only his final moments. Schrader does well in leading us to that shocking moment without being either flippant or overwrought, which are both very common elements in this kind of film, and which are openly avoided through Schrader’s simple but oddly elegant vision of the life and death of the protagonist.

In this regard, Auto Focus is anchored by two performances that are undeniably amongst the best of the 2000s. Greg Kinnear, an actor who has grown into something of a bad actor in the last decade, is giving his finest performance in the part of Bob Crane, a man destroyed by the same desires that gave him so much joy at the height of his fame. The role required an actor with a certain everyman quality, a geniality that gave the impression that he was just an ordinary individual who harboured some dark secrets that ultimately led to his downfall when he lost control. Kinnear is adept at playing both heroic and unlikable characters, and very few films have been able to tap into the actor’s knack for these kinds of roles quite like Auto Focus, where the attention is directed towards Kinnear’s unconventional charms, but also the more unseemly sides of the character that both repulse and attract us. He’s complemented perfectly by Willem Dafoe, who is doing the best work of his career, playing John Henry Carpenter, a character that could be so wonderfully likeable at one moment, and then entirely despicable the next. Dafoe is truly terrifying as Carpenter – a brooding, sinister sycophant of a character, he brings out the malice in a tricky individual that could’ve easily felt like a one-note villain had the actor not been tasked with once again infusing charisma and depth into a very simple character. Schrader and Dafoe often bring out the best in each other, and some of their other collaborations are amongst their personal career highlights on both accounts. Both actors are doing incredible work, and rise above the more quaint aspects of the story, constantly conveying the sense that just because they’re eccentric doesn’t mean the film is going to let them off the hook – Schrader holds both Crane and Carpenter accountable for their deplorable actions, and Kinnear and Dafoe are both equally on board when it comes to giving nuance to some very tricky characters.

While we can look to these performances as a starting point, Auto Focus is a film that just doesn’t feel like it can be pinned down to one particular kind of story – Schrader blends genres just as much as he does sources, bringing together a vivid tapestry of the life of one of entertainment’s more enigmatic figures, whose life and death may have been a scandal at the time, but has barely filtered through to the contemporary age. Auto Focus reminds us of one of the industry’s great mysteries, and through the process looks stunning and stylish at every moment, giving it even more of a sense of despair, since we never quite know whether a scene is going to end in some pleasant laughter, or in a terrifying outburst. The sense of mystery that pervades every frame of Auto Focus is amongst its finest qualities, and keeps us constantly engaged with what we’re seeing on screen. It doesn’t make much difference what the film is saying – it delivers exactly what it promises, and while a more puritanical view would claim that it would’ve been more interesting to focus on the ebbs and flows of Crane’s career, Schrader looks at it from the perspective of directly addressing the perverted undertones that have constantly constituted an extensive series of footnotes in the career of a man who brought so much joy in his life, while fighting personal quandaries that ultimately led to a haunting decline and an even more tragic demise. Auto Focus gives us unfettered insights, not only into the mind of its central characters, but also to the wider society in general, showing us the various issues that unsettle it, and unleashing a kind of misanthropic chaos into the proceedings, making Auto Focus a truly difficult experience, albeit an entirely unforgettable one.

Auto Focus isn’t always an easy film to watch, especially when it grows increasingly jarring – seemingly a conscious choice on the part of the director, who intended to show the gradual deterioration of his subject’s physical and psychological state – but it’s oddly always rivetting. Hollywood satires tended to have this sheen of intentional artificiality, with bold colours, eccentric characters and upbeat atmospheres that often concealed a much more harrowing set of truths just out of sight. Schrader employs many of these same ideas here – the production design brings to life the period of Crane’s rise and fall from grace, portraying the change in temporal seasons between the late 1960s to his murder towards the end of the 1970s, painting a hauntingly beautiful portrait of the culture. Ultimately, Auto Focus isn’t just a film about Bob Crane, but also about a particular period of time – the dominant mindsets, the attitudes towards certain issues and what it took for someone to be considered decent or a deviant, with the boundary between the two being surprisingly narrow, as demonstrated through Crane’s philandering adventures. The film dives deep into some very challenging issues, and presents them in such a stylistic fashion, which gradually disintegrates into a bleak, matter-of-fact approach that is simultaneously insightful and outright terrifying. Crane was part of a generation of people who could attribute their inability to control their urges to being “hot-blooded American males”, rather than addressing the deeper psychological implications of such behaviour – and despite focusing on two incredibly despicable characters, Schrader infuses the film with a sense of what seems to be compassion, looking at Crane as a man who was a victim to his own flaws, rather than someone entirely defined by it.

At both the individual and socio-cultural level, Auto Focus is a powerful film that ventures into unchartered territory, especially considering how this appears to be another fascinating but predictable satire about showbusiness. We are given insights into some of the machinations of the industry, which are certainly very interesting – but where the film really carries weight is in how it approaches deeper subjects with a sense of intimacy, never being exploitative but also rarely deviating from being direct in the message it intends to convey. The authenticity of this story can be debated – many of Crane’s colleagues and family members have contested some aspects of this film in terms of how it represents the departed – but what is almost undeniable is how Schrader extracts so much from a premise that could have so easily been so much more convoluted had a director intent on portraying every detail been in charge, as opposed to one who latched onto a set of key ideas, which he explores to completion, culminating in harrowing climax that can rival any traditional horror film in how chilling it is. Ultimately, Auto Focus is a tremendously compelling film that hasn’t quite found the audience it deserved. Whether we attribute this to the more controversial subject matter, or the fact that it takes the form of a buoyant comedy, when in actuality its an incredibly disturbing psychological thriller, it’s clear that it needs a wider audience – not only for the sharp writing, haunting insights into the industry or incredible performances, but also since it carries such an unexpected emotional heft, which hints at something far more complex than we could fathom at a surface-level glance. This may not be his defining work, but it certainly warrants reappraisal and another look, especially from those who appreciate this kind of offbeat, existential nihilism that Schrader puts together so well in all of his films, which show the most hideous sides of humanity, from which we simply fail to turn away.