Can it be—another riveting movie about Truman Capote? With an arguably even more convincing portrayal of the dastardly little genius himself? Infamous, out this month from Warner Independent Pictures, covers the same pivotal period in the writer's life and career as last year's Capote—the six years, from 1959 to 1965, it took him to create the book that would make him rich but break his spirit, In Cold Blood. Small-town Kansas, the murdered farm family, the psychopathic killers, the square but fair detective, the author's childhood friend and fellow novelist Harper Lee—it's all here, again.

But director Douglas McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay-based on George Plimpton's oral history, Truman Capote: In Which Various Friends, Enemies, Acquaintances, and Detractors Recall His Turbulent Career—takes a much more baroque approach to his subject: where Capote was somber, Infamous is satirical; where Capote was restrained, Infamous is over the top. And while Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman was witty, touching, even dignified, Toby Jones gives us a Truman who comes closer to the unholy terror I came to know in the 1970s when he eked out several short pieces for the magazine I edited, Andy Warhol's Interview. This is Truman the society brat, the inveterate liar, the campy romantic, as well as Truman the dogged reporter, seductive raconteur, and tortured alcoholic.

What's more, Infamous has the "swans," those long-necked jet-set socialites who confided their deepest secrets to Truman and hung on his every word, and whom he ultimately betrayed in an excerpt from what was supposed to be his great Proustian masterpiece, Answered Prayers, which he never finished. Here Toby Jones poses as Truman Capote, with Sigourney Weaver as Babe Paley, the fashionable second wife of CBS founder William S. Paley; Hope Davis as Slim Keith, the onetime model who married a British lord after losing her Hollywood-agent husband to Pamela Harriman; and Isabella Rossellini as Marella Agnelli, the elegant Neapolitan princess wed to Fiat king Gianni Agnelli.