Norman Mailer once wrote that Truman Capote was the greatest lightweight of all-time. As a young reader I took Normie’s pronouncement as a back-handed compliment. Now some forty years later, remembering my years in the world of boxing, I know that most would agree that Roberto Duran actually was the greatest lightweight of all-time. And he was truly GREAT. To watch him fight, even in his declining years, was to watch the soul of greatness in pugilism. He knew every trick in the book. This makes me now understand the meaningfulness of Herr von Mailer’s words.

Regretfully, many of us recall Truman Capote as a pathetic pill-popping drunken fairy, as he was always a high-profile character, outrageous in his many TV talk show appearances to the end.

Mailer, Duran, Capote: in the greatness column add Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the greatest actors in the English language; coming off his title, and now signature performance in Capote.

The time-frame covers precisely 1959-1965 when he researched and wrote the ground-breaking novel, In Cold Blood, which changed literature forever. To read this novel, and those he wrote before it, is to be thrilled with the magic of language. And Hoffman was born to play Capote during these good years about the making of this piece of world literature. Capote at this time was a clean-cut, immaculate, hilarious young raconteur with a drink in his hand half the time, but still not yet a guzzler.

It’s tempting, but not really appropriate, to compare Richard Brooke’s film version of In Cold Blood, which was made in the 60’s not long after the book was released. Though the subject is the same, they are two entirely different species of film. The Brooke’s film is a more-or-less wooden, slavish copy of the book, with a dash of anti-capital punishment didacticism. The unfortunate Robert Blake as Perry Smith in the oldie is the one single thing better than in the new Capote. And it still makes one blush at the embarrassing miscasting of Paul Stewart as Capote.

If you live in a vault or perhaps are just not a reader, this true story is about two ex-cons drifting about who murder a prosperous Kansas farm family of four one dark, windy, beast of a night in 1959 – anticipating a grand theft. But ironically they glean only forty or fifty dollars from the slaughter.

Truman Capote read their story in the New York Times and it set his imagination on fire. Together with his life-long friend, Harper Lee (about to bring out her beloved To Kill a Mockingbird, in which one of the characters is based on Capote as a little boy), it took only a phone call to his publisher at the New Yorker, William Shawn (Bob Balaban) to get he and Harper (indie-queen Catherine Keener) on a plane to Kansas that night.

This dandy in Kansas’ first task was to get the folk to trust him. But even they could spot a dandy who was a daisy. So, first he endears himself to the sheriff (Chris Cooper) through the lawman’s chatty book-club wife. Not a gag-meister, his was the art of the nimble mind’s dry martini bon mot. Back in New York he sends his friends in paroxysms of laughter when he told one of the wealthy Kansans that two of the four abstract masterpieces on his walls were hung upside-down. Such anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the film. Was Capote a snob? You bet, but always figuratively a huggable teddy bear. Well, maybe not “huggy.”

The pair of murderers, Dick and Perry, are soon caught, and it’s immediately obvious they’re not the monsters of everyone’s knee-jerk reactions. What’s the expression … “the banality of evil” …?

Truman jumps right on the stick and does whatever he must do to locate the crystal of truth: the beating heart of the story from the town folk and lawmen, or noticing clues in the crime photos that have been overlooked by the detectives. And he finally meets the killers. His New Yorker magazine credentials are his player’s chip. Virtually all his conversations are with the infinitely more fascinating Perry. Though tragically damaged goods since childhood with no schooling, the prisoner is a most extraordinary fellow: a talented artist and masterful with language in speech and writing – with good looks to spare.

Capote, professional to the bone, does whatever it takes to get to the soul of Perry Smith – including fibbing and assorted deception – yet he remains a most sympathetic character as he inevitably begins to fall in love with the killer. His tears and sorrow are the real thing with no blubbering – as the murderers are taken to the “warehouse” and the hangman’s noose.

All emotion is impeccably understated to create a masterful performance which will win Philip Seymour Hoffman the Academy award for Best Actor – with apologies to Joaquin Phoenix for the great job he did in the Johnny Cash movie.

Don’t even think about it. It’s Hoffman’s year. And did I say too that Capote will win Best Picture – leaving the gay cowboys behind eating dust, and each other.