Before Denis Villeneuve was one of the king directors of the big screen, before Sarah Polley won an Oscar for Women Talking, before Ryan Reynolds was ad-libbing Deadpool to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, an argument could easily be made the David Cronenberg was Canada’s most creative cinematic export. A visionary director who started with horror but whose canon was more than just body modification and the Brundlefly, Cronenberg was a genius who found a way to film William Burroughs’ impenetrable Naked Lunch, and foretold the world’s obsessive-compulsive relationship with video games in eXistenz.

Though he’s often danced with Hollywood, and has certainly had big name stars in his movies, David Cronenberg has remained distinctly Canadian, someone that those of us who live in the Great White North have long been proud to claim as one of our own, which makes it somewhat strange that his 2014 film Maps to the Stars manages to succinctly capture the lure and corrupting nature of Los Angeles.

Written by Bruce Wagner, based on his original novel Dead Stars, Maps to the Stars pulls a host of Hollywood tropes together into a cynical and disturbing story. Julianne Moore plays aging actress Havana Segrand, still famous but desperate to land a role as her own movie-star mother. John Cusack is Stafford Weiss, a self-help tv therapist to the stars (including Havana) and the father of Benjie (Evan Bird), a successful teen actor just out of rehab and dealing with demons, including those of his long-lost sister Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a pyromaniac who has returned to Hollywood to make amends with her family. Mia takes a job with Agatha and also begins a relationship with limo driver and aspiring actor Jerome (Robert Pattinson).

Maps to the Stars is in many ways a darker take on the Hollywood dream of a film like Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (I’ll get to it). There’s drugs and scandal and deception and romance, with some incest thrown in for good measure. When Agatha arrives in town, it’s with stars in her eyes. By film’s end, those stars are far from shining bright.

Following the critical acclaim yet lacklustre box office of his previous film, Cosmopolis (also starring Robert Pattinson), Maps to the Stars was another David Cronenberg film that went under the commercial radar upon its release (late fall 2014 in Canada and early winter 2015 in the U.S.), which is unfortunate as it contains some excellent performances from its lead actors. Julianne Moore won the Best Actor Award at Cannes in 2014, a deserved accolade. Her Havana is equal parts heartbreaking and revolting, and Moore often flips between the two in a moment.

While Moore is never less than great in a film, John Cusack has been hit or miss on film since the 2010s. In Maps to the Stars, he delivers some of his best work of the decade, on par if not better than his performance as Brian Wilson in 2014’s Love & Mercy. For his work, Cusack won Best Actor in a Supporting Role at the 2015 Canadian Screen Awards. In a film about acting and the toll it can take, everyone involved is at the top of their game.

Though he typically films in Toronto, and did so again here, Cronenberg also went on location in the United States for the first time for Maps to the Stars. As he told The Hollywood Reporter in 2014, “There are places in Toronto that look strangely like places in L.A. — there’s some very modern houses and architecture. Most of the Toronto shooting took place in a modern hospital or in private residences — that was doable. [We had to] put a bunch of palm trees in the garden, and it worked very well. I’ve been told many times by friends in L.A. that you could not tell the film wasn’t shot entirely in L.A. But those five days were crucial, and it was really fun.”

Reviews at the time often refer use terms like “darkly comic” in referring to Maps to the Stars, and while there may be some humourous moments, its hard to find a film funny when it depicts child strangulation and assault. Rather, Maps to the Stars is a thematically dark, dark film, only slightly hidden by the sunshine and palm tress of Los Angeles.