The detective, Adrien Brody, is ambitious but a bit below average, perhaps like Reeves himself. It seems like he would refrain from chewing gum while speaking to witnesses and adopt a more conventional hair style. I would have tried to look neater while talking to Reeves' elderly mother. She believes her son was murdered and hires Brody to investigate.
Flashbacks show Ben Affleck as George Reeves and his relationship with the wife of one of the heads of MGM. She bought the real George Reeves the sports car that Clark Kent drove on the TV show.
It ends---shall I tell you the end? If you don't want to read it, stop reading now.
SPOILER ALERT
It ends pretty much the way I expected. It's a standard structure in a lot of mysteries. The detective goes off on a tangent, pursuing one theory, working through the details of the characters' soap opera-like lives. Then, in the end, he discards all that and coming to a very simple solution to the initial mystery. David Mamet's movie Homicide is an example of this. I could name a few others that do this, but I don't want to give them away.
In this case, we know that George Reeves was unable to find work. He had been hopelessly typecast as Superman. (He appeared in a small role in From Here to Eternity. According to Wikipedia, it is an urban legend that his role was cut when test audiences recognized him as Superman---all of Reeves' scenes which appeared in the script were left in the film.)
Reeves had one last offer. He could work as a professional wrestler. But the promoters need assurances that the aging Reeves is up to it physically. So Reeves goes out into the yard in a Judo uniform. We see a film he shot to show the wrestling promoters. It shows him alone in the yard showing what he can do. Judo rolls and so forth. And it's clear that, no, he's not up to it and he knows it, too. His back hurts. He's a very healthy 44-year-old, but he's still a 44-year-old.
We're supposed to conclude that this was why he killed himself.
The movie focused on corruption in Hollywood, the power of the studios, what a scumbag E.J. Mannix was at MGM. He was basically a mobster. TV seemed like a pretty wholesome business by comparison. Why would anyone want to be a movie star?
I watched Superman in syndication when I was a kid. The episode with the Mole Men was the only one I specifically remember watching when I was four or five.
I watched it on videotape years later. Superman doesn't do that much. Mostly walks around talking to people.
In one scene, he faces a gun-toting mob. He blocks them from entering a courthouse where one of the mole men is. He won't let them in. The crowd has no respect for Superman---they're not in awe or the least bit impressed. In fact, one of them takes a pot shot at him. The bullet bounces off him, but it almost hit Lois Lane. So Superman decides to take away their guns. He wades into the crowd and starts disarming them.
I don't know if the NRA got their panties in a bunch over that. It was around that time that the NRA launched a letter-writing campaign against Dragnet. There was an episode where a child, an 8-year-old, was accidentally killed with a rifle he had just gotten for Christmas. Jack Webb passed the letters from the gun nuts on to the Los Angeles Chief of Police who publicly stated that he hoped they did more shows exposing the idiocy of giving guns to children.
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