Hollywood legend bites hand that feeds him in lush ‘ Mank’

Like Alfonso Cuaron’s “Roma” or Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood,” director David Fincher’s “Mank” relishes the pleasures of swank, alluring period re- creation.

Once it opens in theaters and settles in on Netflix ( Dec. 4), it’ll be catnip for anyone who lives, moviewise, for the sight of exquisitely costumed extras piling out of fancy old automobiles in front of a mock- up of the Cafe Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard. In living, poetic black and white.

“Mank” is more than a look, though, even if it’s somewhat less than a masterwork.

Fincher’s film, made with the most sophisticated digital means to l ook as analog as possible, comes from a long- unproduced sc r i pt begun 30 years ago by Fincher’s father, journalist Jack Fincher. He died in 2003. Once Netflix gave direc t or Fincher the go- ahead, Fincher and his frequent collaborator Eric Roth revised and refocused, though Jack Fincher retains sole credit. In its welter of fragmentary, hopscotching 1930s flashbacks, as well as in its reason for being, “Mank” owes everything to “Citizen Kane” and how it came to be.

Its present tense is 1940. The subject is screenwriter, wit, drunk and disorderly social satirist Herman J. Mankiewicz, played by Gary Oldman. “Mank” unfolds largely in an isolated dude ranch in Victorville, California, far from the Trocadero and Mank’s usual temptations. The dissolute writer with the superhumanly patient spouse known as “poor Sara” ( Tuppence Middleton) has 60 days to complete a first draft of the film he called “American,” before it became “Citizen Kane,” a film by Orson Welles. That’s how Welles wanted it known.

In the end, though, the star, di re c t or and c re di t ed c o - author gave Mankiewicz top billing for their politically dangerous, semi- disguised portrait of publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, played here by Charles Dance, fleshing out an underwritten role with sly authority.

The heart of “Mank” belongs to the friendship between the screenwriter and the actress Marion Davies ( Amanda Seyfried, a platinum- blonde emblem of gum- chewing glamour). Davies, Hearst’s longtime lover, may not have been as forgiving toward Mankiewicz’s disguised portrait of her in “Kane” as “Mank” would have us believe. But it’s a biopic, not a documentary. This central relationship gives Oldman and

Seyfried what they need to cut through the artifice.

The film’s limitation is a simple one: The script l acks wit. It wears i ts “Kane” structural influences heavily, while director Fincher wears that film’s profound visual dynamics ( all hail “Kane” cinematographer Gregg Toland) more lightly. Fincher’s compositions reference Welles directly here and there: At one point, in a San Simeon dinner party sequence, Oldman’s head takes up one- third off the frame on the right, while a ridiculously large fireplace looms in the background. It’s pure “Kane.” In contrast, the reams of period- apt dialogue and banter, while sometimes pungent, never quite capture the sound, the fizz, the elder Fincher so clearly admired in Mankiewicz’s own creations.

So I like it, don’t love it, though I do love the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, which boasts a seriously haunting main theme ( and some deft “cool school” jazz, even if it’s more ’ 50s and ’ 60s than ’ 30s). “Mank” seems destined, in this Netflix- dominating pandemic era, to earn a dozen Academy Award nominations. It’s a beautiful mirage of another era of filmmaking, and filmmakers, and the writers they called colleagues, sometimes. Fincher wisely doesn’t play the Old Hollywood imitation game as obsessively as Steven Soderbergh did in his folly “The Good German.”

It’s best t aken, I think, as a romantic gesture to a writer who loved movies. Well, two, really: Herman J. Mankiewicz and Jack Fincher.