Leigh's note-perfect performance as writer, wit, and professional drunk Dorothy Parker is the centrepiece. Although the film opens on her living out her years as a scriptwriter in Hollywood, the bulk flashes back to Jazz Age New York, first as the writer of acidic reviews for Vanity Fair and later as a freelance of extraordinary ability and negligible output. Lunchtimes for the caustic Mrs. Parker were spent at the Algonquin Hotel, at the infamous, noisy Round Table of fellow writers and critics presided over by an imperious maitre d' (the wonderful Wallace Shawn). As someone notes towards the end, she may have been a writer but Mrs. Parker was famous for taking lunch.

Thus the essence of Rudolph and Randy Sue Coburn's impressive screenplay is an attempt to sketch the details of what made Mrs. Parker justly celebrated. The engine for the film, however, is provided by the passionately platonic relationship between Parker (a notorious, if you will, maniser, with a fondness for well-developed bodies and underfunded brains) and fellow, married writer Robert Benchley (a terrific performance by Campbell Scott). The film uses this grand folie a deux to explain much of the creative frustration we see; his death is met by Parker's flood of unquenchable rage.

These two provide a necessary anchor to a film that surges around them with a large, uniformly excellent cast: Jennifer Beals as Campbell's frumpy wife; Martha Plimpton; Lili Taylor; Keith Carradine; Nick Cassavetes; Sam Robards; Peter Gallagher; and former brat-packers Matthew Broderick and Andrew McCarthy, as Mrs. Parker's lover and husband respectively.

Structurally Rudolph's film is not elaborate but is still telling. The New York hey-days are richly coloured and dusted with a heavy sepia, but later events, as Parker drifts through Hollywood with her knitting and dogs and booze - eventually to make do without the knitting - are shot in a harsh black and white; the action throughout is punctuated with straight-to-camera monochrome interludes of Parker's "doodads". The contrast between these often bitter asides ("And if that makes you happy kid/You'll be the first it ever did") and the off-the-cuff, very funny witticisms elsewhere is persuasive.

The whole stands or falls though on Leigh's performance, and given the chance to carry a film on her own at long last, she acquits herself with remarkable (if not unexpected) strength. It took an award from the National Society of Film Critics, and a Golden Globe nomination, but was bizarrely overlooked for an Oscar. Her recreation of Parker's laggardly drawl is so effective some audiences have called for subtitles.

A little overlong in its second half, perhaps, the film tends to neglect the real Dorothy Parker's left-wing credentials and her proud work during the Spanish Civil War (only hinted at under the credits), but then maybe this is just not that film. Hers was a complex and frustrated life and the parts Rudolph has elected to dramatise are beautifully, painfully realised.