Film

The Aviator

Scorsese's sweeping account of Howard Hughes tracks the golden decades — movie mogul, record-breaking aviator, industrial titan — while the OCD tightening around him is shown not as backstory but as a slow-motion catastrophe happening in real time. It's lavish, propulsive, gorgeous to look at, with DiCaprio doing career-best work. Best for anyone who loves old Hollywood glamour and character studies of brilliant men coming apart.

TMDb rating7.2

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The Wolf of Wall Street2013

Same director, same star, same interest in American excess curdling into self-destruction — but faster, filthier, funnier. If you liked watching DiCaprio play a man drunk on his own myth, this is the id version.

But It's exhausting on purpose — three hours of hedonism with almost no relief, and some find the excess numbing rather than damning.

The Wolf of Wall Street poster

Raging Bull1980

Scorsese's earlier portrait of a self-destructing genius, this time a boxer whose paranoia and rage do to his life what OCD does to Hughes's. Bleaker, blacker-and-white, and just as controlled.

But Jake LaMotta is far less charming company than Hughes — there's no glamour cushioning the descent, just cruelty.

Raging Bull poster

Citizen Kane1941

The original tycoon biopic, and arguably the one Scorsese was in conversation with — a media mogul's rise and hollow, isolated decline, told with the same appetite for scale and myth-making.

But Its innovations are now so absorbed into film language that newcomers sometimes ask what the fuss was about.

Citizen Kane poster

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Wings1927

Hughes made his own aviation epic, Hell's Angels, in direct rivalry with films exactly like this one — Wings is the genre's origin point, made the same year The Aviator's story begins.

The silent film that won the first Best Picture Oscar and set the template for aerial spectacle — the exact genre Hughes would later try to outdo and outspend with Hell's Angels. Watching it is watching what he was actually competing against.

But Silent, slow by modern pacing, and its melodrama plays broad — this asks patience a sound-era audience isn't used to giving.

Wings poster
More like this (8)

A Beautiful Mind2001

Another true story of a brilliant mind slowly betrayed by its own machinery, with a lead performance built on tics and private terror rather than obvious villainy.

But It's gentler and more sentimental than Hughes's story — the film wants you to leave comforted, which softens some of the horror.

A Beautiful Mind poster

Catch Me If You Can2002

DiCaprio again, in a lighter register — a charming con man building an identity out of confidence and performance, which makes a fun companion to Hughes's own self-invention.

But It's a caper, not a tragedy — if you want the darker unraveling, this stays breezy almost to the end.

Catch Me If You Can poster

Ed Wood1994

A love letter to old Hollywood filmmaking from the inside, with a director's obsessive devotion to the craft standing in for Hughes's own — plus terrific period detail and warmth.

But It's a comedy at heart, affectionate rather than tragic, so the tonal gears don't match if you want Hughes's darkness.

Ed Wood poster

The Social Network2010

A modern version of the same engine — a brilliant, socially damaged innovator whose genius and isolation are the same thing, told with real narrative propulsion.

But Its coldness is deliberate and total; there's little of the warmth or tragic sympathy Hughes is given.

The Social Network poster

Amadeus1984

A period biopic of genius shading into instability, gorgeously mounted and theatrical, with a lead performance as showy and committed as DiCaprio's.

But It's more interested in rivalry and myth than psychological realism, so the illness here is more symbol than study.

Amadeus poster

Bugsy1991no page yet

A glossy, old-Hollywood-adjacent biopic of another visionary with grand ambitions and a fatal blind spot, told with similar visual lushness and period glamour.

But It's more romance than psychological portrait, and the stakes feel smaller than Hughes's genuine historical weight.

Grey Gardens1976

Same trajectory as Hughes's later life — wealth curdling into compulsive isolation — except this is documentary reality, not a movie star playing it with dignity restored.

A documentary about two once-glamorous, wealthy eccentrics who withdrew from the world into filth, ritual and isolation — an eerily precise, unscripted echo of where Hughes was heading after the film ends.

But It's uncomfortable and voyeuristic by design, watching real decline rather than a scripted, sympathetic version of it.

Grey Gardens poster

The Machinist2004

Same engine as Hughes's unraveling — compulsion as a physical, escalating threat — but shot as lean genre horror instead of prestige biopic, showing how much a costume change can do to the same idea.

A gaunt, grim psychological thriller about a man's rituals and compulsions physically consuming him, stripped of all Hughes's wealth and glamour down to bare obsession and body horror.

But It's small, ugly and unglamorous on purpose — no lavish sets or movie-star charisma, just dread in a cheap apartment.

The Machinist poster

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Recommended by

A Beautiful Mind, The Right Stuff, Citizen Kane, Tucker: The Man and His Dream, The Bad and the Beautiful, Being the Ricardos, Chaplin