Directed by Martin Scorsese. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, and Kate Beckinsale. Rated PG.

There's a scene in The Aviator--one of many gleaming moments in Martin Scorsese's generously entertaining epic--in which Leonardo DiCaprio, as Howard Hughes in his pink-faced prime, nixes the design of a sleek new plane because he can still feel the recessed rivets on its aluminium surface. Later, he runs his hand over the refinished version as if it is more magnificent by far than Jane Russell's zeppelinlike breasts.

Hughes--if your mind reaches back past the decrepit recluse with Kleenex boxes on his feet--was not only an eccentric billionaire famous for bedding Hollywood babes and dumping buckets of germ-laden dollars from his Texas aviation fortune. He was also a truly independent innovator back when the movie business was all about the studio.

DiCaprio might not be many people's first choice to play the offbeat tycoon, but Scorsese gives him a lot of room to grow into the part, and he does. We meet his young-adult self at the ass end of the silent era, when our hero is racking up debt trying to finish Hell's Angels, a movie that would end up wowing 'em at the box office as well as in the early Oscars, not to mention inspiring generations of motorcycle outlaws. Hughes himself had an outlaw streak, as later seen in his flagrant testing of Hays Code censorship, via the aforementioned mammaries of Ms. Russell.

Here, the flouting of authority (and the asserting of it) always has a vaguely political tinge, whether he's challenging Tinseltown royalty (in a rather weak exchange with Stanley DiSantis as an unlikely Louis B. Mayer) or taking on monopolistic Pan Am chief Juan Trippe and stoogelike senator Ralph Owen Brewster, played, respectively and unforgettably, by Alec Baldwin and Alan Alda.

As usual for him, Scorsese seems more interested in men jockeying for power than in anything like sex. But the women are not exactly pushovers. Although Kate Beckinsale's cucumber-cool Ava Gardner doesn't come across as quite the party girl her reputation suggests (make that insists upon), she gets some of the best lines in John Logan's script. When her sometime-lover begins succumbing to the fear of germs that would later cripple him, she coos, "Nothing's clean, Howard. But we do our best."

Still, it's Cate Blanchett's turn as Katharine Hepburn that really brings the movie to life. With her patrician mien and haughty gate--not to mention those granite cheekbones--she doesn't even have to look like the pants-wearing ingénue to exactly capture her revolutionary appeal in 1935, when Variety called her "box-office poison".

Anachronisms abound in song selection, everyday speech ("I'll get into it," his finance chief, played by stalwart John C. Reilly, keeps braying), and even sequence of events, but the three-hour movie reads right anyway. It's certainly visually convincing. There's a different colour palette for each decade, and different rhythms to the characters' speech: clipped and giddy in the '20s, playfully interwoven in the '30s, and heavily freighted by the postwar period. Throughout the parade of sometime fragmented bits of history, there's superb continuity from Oliver Stone regular Robert Richardson behind the camera and Scorsese's inveterate editor, Thelma Schoonmaker.

In the end, one could say that the movie is overly sympathetic to its subject; it even turns the nadir of his flying career, the test of the so-called Spruce Goose, into a moral victory. The similarly gargantuan cast includes Jude Law as Errol Flynn, Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow, a whole mess of Wainwrights as nightclub singers, Willem Dafoe, Brent Spiner, Ian Holm, and Edward Herrmann as (in the movie's biggest surprise) someone other than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

I just wish there hadn't been so many Orson Welles cameos--not that the late Citizen Kane director ever appears. The attempt to turn Hughes's fetishizing of the word quarantine into the movie's Rosebud is one bit of homage The Aviator should have left at the airport.