To describe Clifford Irving as a consummate liar would be an understatement. The man elevated bulls*** into an art form. He was the Michelangelo of mendacity, a fraud who danced around deception with the grace of the young Nureyev. The real-life tale of the born storyteller who became consumed by his own fictions is the subject of The Hoax, a classy, deftly constructed drama from Lasse Hallström.

Irving is played here by Richard Gere and it’s a role that suits his huckster’s charm and slightly time-ravaged pretty-boy looks down to the ground. Irving is a writer who feels that he’s been cheated out of realising his early potential. “My lit professor at Cornell compared me to Hemingway,” he exclaims, having just been dismissed as a third-rate Philip Roth knockoff.

It’s a complex cocktail of motivations that leads him to do what he does – part revenge, part prank, part intellectual exercise and a big part avarice. But Irving manages to convince the publishers who rejected his novel that he has exclusive access to the eccentric billionaire recluse Howard Hughes, and that Hughes has requested that Irving write his memoirs. More impressively, Irving manages to convince himself that he won’t be caught out. “He’ll never come out of hiding to denounce us because he’s a lunatic hermit. And I am the spokesman for the lunatic hermit,” he announces triumphantly to his friend and researcher Dick Suskind (a terrific Alfred Molina).

Irving, it turns out, has a talent for deception. He’s already on remand in his marriage to Edith (Marcia Gay Harden), a German artist who can’t quite forgive him for his affair with beautiful, shallow Nina (Julie Delpy) who loves wealth and celebrity more than she’ll ever love any man. He has a conman’s instinct for detail that he deploys like a fencer, and his footwork is impeccable. Which is just as well because Dick Suskind is rather less gifted as a liar – panic glazes his eyes when he’s under pressure.

What’s really interesting about the film is its evocation of a mind in the process of breaking down. Irving’s deception takes a hold of him like a cancer, until the point where, even when he has an opportunity to tell the truth (“This is your chance to be straight,” says an anguished Edith), he fences himself in with yet more lies. He identifies with Hughes to such an extent that he begins to believe that the billionaire actually does speak through him, that Hughes’s silence is a tacit approval.

And since the film is largely told through Irving’s eyes, it’s increasingly difficult for the audience to tell what’s real and what’s fantasy. The film’s meticulously evoked atmosphere adds to the experience: archive news footage creates a back-drop of the Nixon era’s institutional mendacity; the superb Carter Burwell score swirls anxiously.

Not everything shown in the film actually happened in real life. A scene that bookends the picture showing the frenzied preparations at the publishing house for Hughes’s visit by helicopter is entirely fictitious. But then if there’s one thing to be learnt from Clifford Irving’s magnificent deception, that’s never to let the truth get in the way of a good story.

15, 116mins

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