Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz in Official Competition (IFC Films)

When a wealthy businessman thinks funding nonprofits isn’t enough to create personal prestige, he decides to fund a movie and hire an auteur director, Lola Cuevas (Penélope Cruz), with a carte blanche understanding: cost, time, plot, meaning don’t matter, just make an award winner.

That doesn’t seem to be what’s happening here. Official Competition’s actual directing partners, Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn, are, like Lola, auteurs with international credentials, and Lola’s-film-within-the-making-of-the-film allows Duprat and Cohn and their stars to comment on the artistic process. Its best moments take place when Cruz presumably sends up the directors (artistic, well-respected, and absurdly demanding) that she’s surely had to contend with in her career and Duprat and Cohn poke fun at themselves and their line of work.

The movie takes place in lavish rehearsal spaces, intimate pressure cookers where Lola and her two stars—Félix (Antonio Banderas) and Iván (Oscar Martínez)—read through the script 12 times. All three bruise egos, triumphing and submitting to each other’s needs, puffing their chests constantly. Félix is a blockbuster movie star and Iván is the equivalent of an older method actor who will definitely play King Lear someday. They don’t get along, appropriate for a film called “Rivalry” (Lola’s films only have one-word titles, because they’re art).

Like last year’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, Official Competition touches upon some of the unseen influences behind artistic productions. Here they involve big personalities, valorizing some and skewering others, and a lot of money. Félix and Iván’s private relationships get revealed on screen, and their contrasting acting styles and real-life histories bubble up through the scripted story they portray. But unlike Drive My Car, the commentary ends there, and I wanted more plot and meaning.

Still, it’s great watching Cruz play an empowered impresario. Cruz, Banderas, and Martinez helped create the film’s ridiculous moments caricaturing creative collaborations, along with the directors and their screenwriting partner, Andrés Duprat. Cruz steals the show under a giant wig of red hair, commanding these older men around with wise aphorisms, at one point having them rehearse under a boulder (to create tension), slowly spinning above them on a chain, or shredding their Palme d’Ors and Goya Awards (to destroy the ego). The actors genuinely come across as having fun, but the silliness doesn’t add up to more than light jabs.