Feud: Capote vs the Swans, review: Tom Hollander’s Truman show is a catty, scandalous delight

Arguably, no gay writer since Oscar Wilde has exerted such fascination as Truman Capote. Hence those two London buses in the Noughties. Capote (2005) won Philip Seymour Hoffman an Oscar, unjustly occluding Toby Jones in Infamous (2006).

Tom Hollander’s turn in Feud: Capote vs the Swans (Disney+) may be the truest Truman yet. Over eight episodes telling of Capote’s curdled friendship with New York’s highest society dames, Hollander mewls and miaows, scowls and squeals in 50 shades of fey. Wrists flecked, neck tilted, a dapper little laugh accenting every bon mot, it’s such an immersive performance that you’ll feel as if you’ve moved in with this compelling Capote.

The swans of the title are the lunching priestesses of the Upper East Side who invited him to liven up their bitchy round table, only to eject him when he spilled their secrets in a gossipy short story for Esquire.

As celebrity quarrels go, it lacks the gelignite of the hostilities between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford as portrayed by Ryan Murphy in his previous Feud series. But Jon Robin Baitz’s script endows a sad, meandering saga with novelistic depth and shimmering intensity.

To maximise the appeal of these mainly ghastly and pointless ladies, Murphy and director Gus Van Sant have cast yesteryear’s hot bratpackers. Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart, Demi Moore and Molly Ringwald embody the glamorous chorus, while Jessica Lange purrs as the Southern mother visiting from beyond the grave/a play by Tennessee Williams. “I think it was a very dry teat I was suckling at, mother,” Capote tells her in the climactic episode.

Naomi Watts chills as the haughty Babe Paley, Capote’s swan-in-chief. Her cold fury hurts him more than any sock on the jaw from a violent boyfriend, and her forgiveness is the thing Capote craves more than fame or wealth, and when he doesn’t get it he drinks. Hollander’s addict acting is a genuine marvel. A delicious standalone episode imagines an angelic intervention from James Baldwin (Chris Chalk) to dry Capote out.

Both the films, which Hollander says he studied, involved the author hanging around for years before he could finish In Cold Blood. This drama awaits the completion of a different book: the swansong that he called Answered Prayers. The book was never finished, so the drama finishes it for him in a cathartic fantasia that resolves enmities. The facts are less neat but, as Oscar once quipped, that’s what fiction means.

All episodes of Feud: Capote vs the Swans are on Disney+ now