The prevailing image of Obama in the face of the past week's scandalous revelations is more similar to the weak and aimless Bulworth of the film's beginning.
But the movie tidied and glossed over the deeply tragic undercurrent of Capote's story: an aimless bachelorette who uses sugar daddies as her income and a crutch to avoid the pain of her past.
There is a sort of meeting of opposites between Mr Muldoon's pointed, intricate prestidigitations and the aimless yet alert shamblings of the veteran New York School poet, John Ashbery.