AMBITION. Independent spirit. Vision. Technical daredevilry. Howard Hughes had them all, and so does film auteur Martin Scorsese, whose tribute to the eccentric, womanising, pioneering, high-flying billionaire industrialist presents him as a populist hero, taking the American dream to the skies in the fields of film, aviation, bra design and bed hopping.

Hughes once made the most expensive film in the world, his 1930 wartime epic Hell's Angels, and later he was to stretch the limits of cleavage worship when Jane Russell's hills were alive in The Outlaw, and it is this love of the possibilities of film that colours Scorsese's typically epic movie.

He takes the chance to match Hughes's cinematic brio, first in his recreation of the nerveless directing of Hell's Angels' airborne sequences, then in a guts-and-all plane crash in Beverly Hills that Hughes somehow survived.

Scorsese and screenwriter John Logan construct this biopic around the golden years of the Texan industrialist, restricting the need for Leonardo DiCaprio's Hughes to age too much or for the story to sag under the strain of his reclusive later years.

Instead, The Aviator travels from Hughes making and re-making Hell's Angels in 1928 to making mincemeat of corrupt Senator Brewster (a slippery Alan Alda) in a congressional hearing showdown and finally flying his big monster of a plane, the Spruce Goose, in 1947.

In between come relationships with Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani in a glossy cameo) Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett's distractingly brilliant, clipped impersonation) and Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale, who settles for the period look, not the full characterisation).

Scorsese can't resist making long films, and even though he condenses the Hughes story, to quote Blanchett's Hepburn, "There's too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes". Unlike Goodfellas or Raging Bull, the pace flounders, the directing style is uneven and the tone shifts between the dispassionate and the empathetic.

The childhood roots and growth of Hughes's compulsive-obsessive disorder are threaded through the movie with pleasing artistry, and DiCaprio similarly grows in his somewhat egotistical, increasingly tortured performance. DiCaprio, instincts re-sharpened after his rusty turn in The Gangs Of New York, likes to show everything on screen, but Scorsese wants to protect Hughes's mystery: an awkward mix.

Like the Spruce Goose, The Aviator is lovingly created, painstaking in its detail and takes a long time to fly. It is cumbersome yet visually sumptuous, delightful in its evocation of Hollywood's golden day: fancy film-making but not a great film.

Updated: 16:01 Thursday, January 06, 2005