Boogie Nights<> It's hard to let go of Mark Wahlberg's other name. I know I'm supposed to be calling him by the adult-sounding name, but the other one was so perfect, absurd and adorable. Even if he's come a long way from his previous incarnations as New Kid Donnie's little brother, Funky Buncher, and Calvin Klein pinup; even if he's arrived in Serious Actorville, with his strong performances in Basketball Diaries<>, Fear<>, and now, Paul Thomas Anderson's Boogie Nights<>; and even if, according to The New York Times Magazine<>, the 26-year-old is wearing nonprescription glasses and playing golf, he's still Marky Mark, in my mind. Boogie Nights<> makes smart use of the Marky Mark baggage. When we meet Eddie, in the midst of a spectacular five-minute camera swoop through a San Fernando Valley restaurant circa 1977, he's a charismatic, slightly dim, seductively naive busboy. He happens to have a tremendous cock (13 inches), which he displays for five bucks a pop. He's ambitious and starved for love (his home scene is dreadful, with a bitter and combative mom [Joanna Gleason] and tediously milquetoast dad [Lawrence Hudd]), eager to use his "special gift'' to become a star. Spotted by adult filmmaker Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), 17-year-old Eddie is obliging to the max: he eagerly demonstrates his talents by screwing one of Jack's stable of players, a high-school student called Rollergirl (Heather Graham), so named because she never takes off her roller skates and likes to listen to the Melanie song ("Brand New Key'') while having sex. Impressed with Eddie's natural ability, Jack hires him to appear in his "exotic pictures.'' Eddie is, in turn, thrilled by Jack's apparently generous, Hefneresque lifestyle, though at first he seems less moved by the cocaine, fast cars, and ever ready girls, than by the pool where he can practice his jackknife dives. Jack and his live-in leading lady, Amber Waves (Julianne Moore) provide an appearance of a stable family, sharing their emotional and material wealth with all their friends and coworkers. These include actors Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), Becky Barnett (Nicole Ari Parker), and the perpetually dislocated Buck Swope (the mesmerizing Don Cheadle), whose love of country-western music and dress makes him hopelessly behind the times ("It's coming back,'' he says, hopefully) and crew members Little Bill (William H. Macy), made miserable by his wife's repeated and flagrant infidelity, and Scotty J (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who nurses a serious and underdeveloped crush on Dirk. Drawn loosely from the legend of John Holmes, Eddie's story sprawls across 7 years, from 1977 to the early eighties, the period when porno switched from film to video. Anderson's movie approximates a late-seventies' energy and fearlessness, with period details like a big pop soundtrack (the Emotions' "Best of My Love,'' Three Dog Night's "Mama Told Me Not to Come,'' and, during one harrowing scene, Rick Springfield's "Jesse's Girl,'' revealed here as the psycho-loser song it always was), as well as synthetic fibers, platform shoes. halter tops, and exorbitantly tacky home decor. Advised to change his name, Eddie picks Dirk Diggler, and it's introduced in sublimely garish fashion. Just when he says he wants a name that's "razor sharp'' and "powerful,'' he imagines it in neon and fireworks, all lit up and exploding before our eyes. Boogie Nights<> is full of moments like this, outsized, outrageous, and evocative, illustrating the total narcissism that porn-the-business demands while also suggesting the lack of perspective it encourages. At first everything seems grandly copacetic. Everyone, including money man Colonel James (Robert Ridgely), is initially awed by Dirk's extraordinary dick (that the Colonel is eventually arrested for pedophilia is but one indication that all is not as it seems here). Dirk's ascent is all about his cock and the extraordinary promise it represents (call it what you will: masculinity, potency, power, youth). He wins adult entertainment awards for Best Newcomer and pledges publicly to continue working on "making our movies better.'' Then comes the word - from seasoned filmmaker Floyd Gondolli (played by Philip Baker Hall, who also appeared in Anderson's Hard Eight<>) - that video is coming. Floyd is a realist, declaring that video, faster and cheaper, "tells the truth.'' For all their good times and genuine love for each other, the characters in this world are profoundly adrift. While the first half of the movie chronicles their happy excesses, this ends brutally, with a murder-suicide at Jack's 1979 New Year's Eve party. As the decade turns, so do the characters' fortunes, in particular Dirk's. Falling in love with his own image (understandable, because it's a completely seductive one) and unable to get hard due to his coke habit, Dirk rampages on the set one day. Asserting that he's ready, that he only needs to know "who to fuck,'' he's fired (and Jack already has a new well-endowed young stud in line, one Johnny Doe [Jonathon Quint] to take his place). After attempting and failing to make it as a rock star (the recording session with Reed is quite hilarious), Dirk is reduced to jerking off in tricks' cars for chump change, he's mistaken for gay one night and bashed by a group of macho no-necks. This scene is intercut with another, in which Jack is selling (and taping) Rollergirl in the back of his limousine. When Rollergirl rejects the john (in part because he recognizes her from high school, non-anonymous sex being uncool on the street), Jack beats the shit out of him (aided by Rollergirl, who pounds him with her skates). As the two beating scenes bleed into one another, it's clear that Jack, for all his paternal affect, is a troubled, angry role model for everyone around him, unable to make it as the legitimate filmmaker he longs to be, aging past the point of being able to participate in the encounters he stages, unable to recognize Amber's coke addiction. Throughout the film, Jack runs a gamut, from confidence to creepiness (his actors are his "kids,'' yes, but they're also his property, which he prostitutes regularly). Early on, he tells Dirk that he wants to make a porn film with a story that's compelling enough to keep viewers in their seats even after they've jerked off, because they want to see how it ends. The brief footage we see of his movies suggest that they're standard seventies porn, poorly scripted and acted, very Johnny Wad-ish, or Starsky and Hutch devolved to z-grade. But the self-deception such total badness suggests is really only a superficial punchline. The story told by Boogie Nights<> is more cunning than that, more about how temptation and titillation work. Whatever else it does, whether or not it dramatizes the end or beginning of an era, the movie does convey - with a mix of irony and affection - the utter loveliness of seduction, the sway of sex, and the sheer lunacy that underlies all of it, all the time. That's what's most fun and sophisticated here, the film's willful resistance, its twistings of its own stories, metaphors, and meanings. By the time you finally do get to see Dirk's fabled penis, the emotional context has become so dense, the expectations so ludicrous, that it can only look impossible. Escaped for a minute from his polyester pants, it poses in front of the dressing room mirror while Dirk recites his get-it-up mantra: "You're a star, you're a big shining star.''