The Hoax can -- and should -- be slammed for pretensions to be more than what it is. “Based on the actual facts [and] the book by Clifford Irving,” Swedish Lasse Hallström’s direction from a William Wheeler script would tie the now-forgotten events with the fall of presidencies and, in the process, gain momentum from national awareness of, and a slew of movies about, misinformation, lies, fabrications and plagiarism in politics, the media, literature, academia, business, curricula vitae, sports, everywhere.

But relax, ignore the misplaced Great Implications sidebars, and take it in as sometimes humorous, buddies-on-the-scam adventure, preposterous but somewhat true.

The bigger of the two buddies is a chestnut-haired Richard Gere doing what he does well and often, as a fast talker a shade too glib for his own good, cocky, obnoxious but beguiling. His Clifford Irving is a never-was nobody author, “not Norman Mailer or Shakespeare,” who has gotten the ear of publishing’s inner sanctum -- an arrant impossibility nowadays -- only to be told at the last minute by outer defense hatchet woman Andrea Tate (Hope Davis) that her bosses have reversed field and will not float his latest.

This is not biography, so the actor was careful not to speak to his seventy-six-year-old original until ten days ago. Nor is it truth and nothing but. Baroness Nina van Pallandt (Julie Delpy) is the impossible passion from his recent past, an expensive trophy companion who shallowly calls herself “shallow” and “an actress [pause] and singer.” Not terribly deep himself, the hero seeks fame and money, too, of course, though the fancy cars and suburban house are as much for Swedish-German wife Edith (Marcia Gay Harden), for his deep-down insecurity seeks, not celebrity, but recognition.

His book down the drain, indeed his very contacts threatened, chance events and readings inspire him to grasp at an audacious straw, to claim that the era’s great enigma, unseen in over a decade and communicating by handwritten notes to the phalanx of managers and goons shielding him from the world, has actually contacted him, Irving, to set the record straight by writing the gazillionaire’s authorized “autobiography.”

Truth to tell, the film’s hero doesn’t seem hard-edged enough to pull it off, and the bogus calls, penciled notes tossed off well enough to bamboozle experts, the bits and pieces picked up here and there, and the hesitant helicopters, don’t convince an audience. But stranger things have happened, are happening, and those were still the baby-step days of media becoming just another corporation conglomerate. Licking caricature board members’ chops, McGraw-Hill’s Harold McGraw (John Carter) antes up over half a million and is none too pleased when Luce’s Life’s Ralph Graves (Zeljko Ivanek) comes up with even more for magazine rights.

The obsessive, surely certifiable subject of the proposed memoir is Howard Robard Hughes, recently revived in The Aviator, the basis for Jimmy Dean’s Willard Whyte in Diamonds Are Forever, the designer of Jane Russell’s push-‘em-up bra for The Outlaw -- scant recognition today but once ultra-famous as pilot, inventor, TWA majority stockholder, shaker and maker of politicians and policy, film producer and director, ladies’ man, Vegas casino owner, object of multiple litigations, and notorious hermit.

Given the man’s paranoid aversion to any light of publicity, Irving banks on not having his bluff called. Combining legitimate research with shady methods, Irving compiles public, private and classified information with unpaid research assistant, only friend and Jiminy Cricket conscience, bumbling, prone to panic aspiring writer Dick Suskind (Alfred Molina). Tactics invented as they miraculously stumble along, their success is pure chutzpah, the Big Lie that people want to believe and therefore will.

Eventually the house of cards must pile too high and crumble. But before then, Hallström-Wheeler go far afield. On top of facile period music and the Nixon-Watergate-Nam-Flower Power deadwood, they inexplicably build up a silly Irving-Hughes identification. Yes, both were only children who lost their fathers early, but it is beyond the scope, or any subject-taking-over-the-author bit, to have Gere increasingly dressing, grooming and talking like Hughes even in private, having drink-fueled visions of being strong-armed to the man’s Nevada penthouse and of speaking for him.

Of the two hours less four minutes, the Irving-as-Hughes ought to be cut; ditto the misleading archival extensions. That would leave a nice ninety minutes or so of fun, in the tradition of rather amiable schemers caught up in, and finally by, their own elaborate schemes.

(Released by Miramax Films and rated “R” for language.)