3/5 stars Recreating the unbridled hedonism of early Hollywood in a heady cocktail of sex, drugs, and iconic roles, Damien Chazelle’s indulgent three-hour epic Babylon is both a love letter to and cautionary tale of the excesses of cinema’s golden age. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie headline a sprawling ensemble cast, as the Oscar-winning director of La La Land charts the fluctuating fortunes of a handful of industry players against a backdrop of endless bacchanalia. We first meet opportunistic young studio hand Manny Torres (newcomer Diego Calva) as he is being showered in elephant faeces while delivering the lumbering mammal to an orgiastic party in the Hollywood Hills. Once there, he meets Nellie LaRoy (Robbie), a rambunctious wannabe actress from New Jersey, who is determined to gatecrash the party – and the industry – by any means necessary. Also in attendance are matinee idol Jack Conrad (Pitt), seductive Chinese performer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li), and aspiring African-American jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo). Over the next few years, their lives become increasingly intertwined in the all-consuming quagmire of Tinseltown, a dream factory that destroys its stars while simultaneously immortalising them on screen. The perpetual party, they soon discover, is about to end. The advent of sound sees a near total overhaul of the star system, with precious few of the industry’s most popular performers surviving the transition to talkies. This is coupled with the introduction of the Hayes Code, Hollywood’s first censorship body, which vows to remove all salacious content from the screen and transform Hollywood into a bastion of morality and family values. Babylon rides these seismic shifts as though aboard a runaway roller coaster, depicting gleefully their cataclysmic effects on its fictional protagonists – all of them just a stone’s throw removed from real-life cinematic greats like Douglas Fairbanks and Anna May Wong. Chazelle is eager to illustrate how little there is to differentiate the chaos on set from the carnage of his characters’ private lives, and how many of the era’s most iconic films were conjured into being through a fog of booze, pills and endless fornication. Lavishly staged and utterly bewitched by its subject matter, even as it exposes its least attractive qualities, Babylon remains a story that’s been told countless times. Chazelle ends with a coda, set many years later, which openly acknowledges the huge debt his film owes to Singin’ in the Rain , even as he highlights how that film retooled earlier material and found cause for celebration in the same apocalyptic moment in Hollywood’s fortunes. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook