Starring Emily Mortimer, Stephen Campbell Moore, and Dan Aykroyd. Rating unavailable.

Stephen Fry, best known as an actor, here makes a strong if not entirely coherent writing-directing debut with Bright Young Things, his deluxe, wide-screen adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies.

The 1930 novel was an encapsulation of the madcap, class-smashing aspects of the jazzy decade that had just ended, and one of the strangest things about Fry's version is that--given the flapper-rich particularities of the period--almost the whole movie passes before you realize that he has moved that action forward, to just before the Second World War. In any case, the story centres on one emblematic couple, would-be writer Adam Symes (impressive newcomer Stephen Campbell Moore) and flighty, easily bored Nina Blount (versatile Emily Mortimer, of Lovely & Amazing and Scream 3), who is from money but wants more.

Their forever-postponed marriage plans seem to rest on Adam's inability even to pay for a wedding. The groom's fortunes change several times in a single night, when he wins a thousand pounds in a game of chance and then gives it all to a drunken major who promises to bet the lot on a long-shot horse. The major--played by Jim Broadbent, a staple of Mike Leigh's films--promptly disappears.

Among the many enjoyable cameos here, the one most approximating a real role is that of a Canadian newspaper baron--a cross between Conrad Black and Lord Beaverbrook--played by Dan Aykroyd. Making strong impressions with just a scene each are Imelda Staunton, as an indignant prime minister's wife; Simon Callow, as the would-be king of Anatolia; John Mills, as an old gent who discovers cocaine; Stockard Channing, as an evangelical Yank called Mrs. Melrose Ape; Jim Carter, as the customs officer who confiscates Adam's handwritten manuscript ("I know filth when I see it!"); and--the big gun--Peter O'Toole, as Nina's eccentric and deceptively generous father.

The movie marshals these resources very effectively, with many memorable scenes re-creating a bygone era, down to a section with some fabulous old race cars. Considerable crackle comes from the constellation of people around Nina and Adam, including a flamboyantly gay wit (Michael Sheen), a self-loathing aristocrat--turned--gossip columnist (James McAvoy), and a brash party girl with some hidden insecurities (Fenella Woolgar).

That last pal, probably the most amusing of all the characters, has a flameout that feels like unearned punishment, and she's not the only one to go through arbitrary fluctuations. Adam himself, in delivering the sanctimonious speech that gave rise to Waugh's title, appears to undergo a personality change near the end, perhaps in preparation for a big finish that Fry tacks on to the story. We never get to understand, either, why Nina loathes sex, as the issue is dropped before the lovers find each other after falling apart for the umpteenth time. No matter; any movie in which the protagonists are described as "jiggin' and jazzin' around like Mexican beans" is going to be well worth watching for the parties, if nothing else. More absinthe, my dear?