Film

This latest by indie bantamweight DiCillo (Living in Oblivion) is either a satire in search of its incisors or a fairy tale fighting off a mild depression. The cherubic Pitt, whose charismatic blankness worked so well in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days, plays a homeless, guileless street kid named Toby. When Toby shames a lonely paparazzo named Les (Buscemi) into letting him crash on Les’s couch for one night, the two losers bond à la Midnight Cowboy, and Toby hires on as Les’s unwaged assistant.

Subsequent sequences—in which the rodentlike Les schools sweet-natured Toby in the dark arts of stalking and shooting celebrities—are not without a certain comedic snap, but things start to go south when an airheaded, gold-hearted pop diva named K’Harma (Lohman) picks wide-eyed Toby out of the throng as her next crush.

Tagging along with Toby to K’Harma’s birthday, Les reneges on his promise not to take pictures, thus terminating Toby’s budding romance. But then Toby is discovered by a sultry casting agent (Gershon) and becomes a star in his own right.In its setup phase, Delirious gets by on the deft interplay between Buscemi and Pitt plus its mildly picaresque exploration of the paparazzi underworld, but the tinselly second half more than cancels out the first, and the absurd finale is an actionable instance of narrative malpractice.