It is not unexpected that a film portraying Hollywood as a fickle and soulless industry should be hollow at its core. But it is surprising that a director with Damien Chazelle’s body of work – Whiplash, La La Land – signed off on this bloated, three-hour beast.

Before even the title rolls, someone has been doused in elephant excrement while attempting to truck the poor thing up to a party where drugs are laid out like piles of flour. Here, the elaborate storyline begins as we meet the hedonist wannabe Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie at her most incandescent), who is picked up to replace an actress who overdosed.

“You’re either a star or you ain’t,” she explains, and without a movie deal or acting experience, she knows which she is. On set the next day she stuns the director with her ability to light up the screen. A siren is born, but a silent one because this is the 1920s.

The storylines follow cliched paths to Hollywood success that are later compromised: a gifted jazz trumpeter must rub burnt cork on his face to make himself blacker; an ageing leading man, Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt, bringing his trademark winking savvy to the role), peaks and then passes his prime; and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a wide-eyed Mexican who transforms his first day on a movie set into a career as an executive producer, throws it all away for love.

Stunning visuals and expensive style can’t save Babylon. Photo: Paramount Pictures

There are elaborate set pieces along the way that portray Hollywood as an orgiastic frat house of reckless indulgence. At the opening party, prepare for repellent saturnalia that includes urination, masked sex and a dwarf jumping around on a penis pogo stick as big as he is. A later scene, in which LaRoy fights a rattlesnake that is whipping and flaying around her neck, ends with her apparently poisoned, until lesbian club singer Lady Fay Zhu (Li Jun Li) sucks the venom from her neck (and falls in love).

Meanwhile, Conrad is slammed into by a car – it looked fatal – only to be on set the next day without a scratch.

Babylon lacks not just truth, but heart. Even Manny’s love for LaRoy, who fritters away her money and talent to the point of being annoying, is too little too late. A rare moment of interest is an exchange between Conrad and gossip columnist Elinor St John (Jean Smart), who tells him not to look for a reason why his once adoring audience now laughs. The mood has shifted, your time has passed, get over it and be grateful, she says. If only he knew how.

The storylines are exhausted, signposted and finalised, and yet the film is still going, looping back on itself and attempting a showreel of the evolution of cinema that at one point featured scenes from Avatar.

It is exhausting and unrewarding, even though it is exceptionally well executed with stunning visuals and expensive style. But what an empty gesture from a director who professes a great love of cinema but found so little new to say.

Babylon is in cinemas now.