Mojave

Early in "Mojave," the cunning Hollywood noir from writer/director William Monahan, Jack, a bearded drifter (Oscar Isaac), says he's into "motiveless malignity," which turns out to be a fancy way of calling himself a serial killer -- the Mojave Murderer, it turns out, who is terrorizing strangers in the California desert. He says this to Thomas (Garrett Hedlund), a hipsterish actor on an existential bender, as they sit by a campfire one night in the desert, and the tension is palpable. The men are like two scorpions sizing each other up and you know the end is going to be ugly.

Yet what Monahan does as the pair move from the desert to the Hollywood Hills and back to the desert again is comment on the macho bluster and pretensions of the film industry, one couched in a thriller that suggest Alfred Hitchcock by way of David Lynch. Thomas, it turns out, is a successful Hollywood actor in a funk. He escapes his lawyer, producer and girlfriend by taking a rental jeep off the set of his latest movie and heads to the Mojave. "You go to the desert to find out what you want and what you are, if you're anything at all," he says in a video interview expressing the angst of an actor making $10 million dollars a year.

Are we to take Thomas seriously? It's hard to say, but Hedlund nicely evokes his character's brooding nature; he also conveys his volatile side, and his short fuse may be what saves him from being murdered by Jack in that first campfire encounter. Thomas beats Jack unconscious and escapes with his rifle, which leads to a series of events that locks the men into each others lives. "I have a stalker," Thomas tells girlfriend, an Italian actress with a French name, when he returns to Hollywood. "I have 27, not counting the ones that are in jail," she responds without any sympathy.

Her response points out to what makes "Mojave" so sharply funny, that is Monahan's cutting dialogue. As it tells of Jack's stalking of Thomas, it also offers a mordant portrait of contemporary Hollywood -- a town filled with self-absorbed creeps that Monahan has great fun in satirizing. Take Thomas's producer (a dead-on Mark Wahlberg) and his agent (Walton Goggins), the former a hot-headed ex-drug dealer right out of "Entourage" and the latter an oily sycophant whose only interest is his 15-percent. Monahan only skirts the surface of their machinations -- you learn very little about the stalled movie project that may be the source of Thomas's crisis; but his take on the film industry bristles with the insight of an insider. (Monahan is best-known for writing the script to "The Departed," another movie about macho brinksmanship.)

Rather his thrust is to follow the cat-and-mouse between Thomas and Jack, which is filled Jack's diatribes on the Devil and Shakespeare (he has a thing for "Hamlet") and Thomas's sorrowful stares into the abyss, which are many, usually with Hedlund smoking a cigarette and drinking what I imagine is whiskey. What keeps the film engaging are the performances -- Hedlund does a more than credible job of capturing Thomas's solitary search for meaning, while Isaac appears to have great fun as his sociopathic nemesis. When the pair spar off, be it over sparkling water in a chic, empty bar, or in a violent confrontation in Jack's seedy trailer, the film bristles with suspense that leaves you wondering which one will strike first. That the film ends on an inconclusive note is perfectly consistent with what comes before -- perhaps the best decisions you can make in life are those made with a toss of a coin.