In case you needed more proof, Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s latest film will confirm that Julianne Moore is our bravest actress (and of course one of our best). As aging starlet Havana Segrand, Moore spends a lot of the movie acting like a ruined child, clad in little more than her delicates (and sometimes less than that).

The desperate actress is clinging to the hope of essentially playing her deceased cult icon of a mother in a remake of Mom’s Oscar-winning glory. At the same time, she has hired a strange new assistant, burn-victim Agatha Weiss (Mia Wasikowska), who is the estranged daughter of Havana’s self-help guru, Stafford Weiss (John Cusack, who looks really strange, bordering on Nicolas Cage territory).

Stafford’s other offspring is the aggressively spoiled child star, Benjie (Evan Bird, one of Rosie Larsen’s brothers from “The Killing”). Edward Cullen, aka Robert Pattinson, occasionally pops by in the limo he chauffeurs between acting and writing. Screenwriter Bruce Wagner (he’ll always have a place in my heart for writing my favorite Nightmare on Elm Street; the third, the Dokken-themed Dream Warriors) channels some major Chuck Palahniuk.

The characters, narrative, tone, everything typify the work of the Fight Club novelist and are better than his own attempt at Hollywood satire, Tell-All.

While Cronenberg has seemed to soften since his days as the king of body horror, Maps to the Stars still mines humanity’s strange underbelly.

Maps to the Stars would make a good double-feature with Cronenberg’s notorious Crash. Oddly, Moore received a Golden Globe nomination for Maps to the Stars in the category of Comedy or Musical. Yikes! While dark humor hangs around like cigarette smoke, calling Maps a comedy stretches that category’s boundaries more than Cronenberg stretched the human body in his early work.