By In Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood, the ninth film from director Quentin Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, a journeyman actor facing the decline of his career. Bouncing between TV Westerns, Dalton is called in as The Heavy to face the leading actor in a standoff and die at their hands every time.
Dalton cuts a fairly tragic figure, resigned to being driven around by his stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) after a DUI offence, and forgetting his lines on set after finishing eight whisky sours the night before while trying to learn them.
Pitt's Booth is a brilliant, reckless counterpart to the fledging TV star, but DiCaprio's emotionally fragile Dalton, always teetering between tears and triumph, makes for perhaps his funniest role yet.
Maybe it's because funny films are rarely rewarded with prestigious film accolades, but for an actor who does comedy so well, DiCaprio's career hasn't featured nearly enough of them. His portrayal of Jordan Belfort in Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street, arguably the role he should have won his Oscar for, was a reminder of his comic chops after a long run of dramas and thrillers, save for his wacky take on plantation owner Calvin Candie in Django Unchained.
Tarantino recently revealed that DiCaprio originally wanted to play Booth instead of Dalton, telling Entertainment Weekly: "I have a tremendous amount of respect for Leo as an actor, [and] he wanted to play Cliff, but he knew he was better for Rick."
DiCaprio would likely have made a fine Cliff Booth, but as Rick Dalton he's brilliant, emitting a faint whiff of endearing desperation when he discovers a famous director has moved in next door to him, or tearing up at recognising himself in the story he's reading about a has-been.
After sticking his hungover face into a bowl of ice in order to get his shit together, he splutters through a director's description of the hippie outfit he wants him to wear in perplexed horror. On set shortly afterwards he demonstrates some impressively convincing bad acting, a performance that is so carefully restrained and subtly terrible, that it produces some of the funniest minutes in the film.
Encouraged by praise from the director and his eight-year-old co-star, he holds his gun to the sky and says proudly, "Rick f**king Dalton", while welling up as his own performance. In a film which regularly fawns over the Golden Age of Hollywood, Dalton's character is a welcome reminder of how ridiculous acting really is.
As the climax of Once Upon A Time In... Hollywood leans into the farcical side of Tarantino's imagination, Booth too becomes a more cartoonish version of himself. After returning from a mammoth drinking session he fixes a pitcher of frozen margaritas, before storming outside, jug in hand, to lambast members of the Manson "Family" for bring their loud junk-heap of a car up a private road.
The conclusion of film finds Dalton delivering one of his best lines: telling a startled Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), "I torched the last one" in reference to him annihilating someone with a flamethrower, a bemused smile on his face as Rick f**king Dalton recalls his own heroics.
