With his production credits, his press-baiting celebrity marriage (to Demi Moore), his campaigning for Obama, his one million Twitter followers, his anti-malaria fundraising, his TV show, his modelling, his interactive new media company and his LA restaurants, Ashton Kutcher has started to look more like a multinational celebrity brand than an actor. Any good businessman would have noted by now that the time was ripe for this brand to reassert its screen credentials with a credible starring role under a respected director. Kutcher, clearly, is no slouch in business – and so we come to Spread. A US debut by David Mackenzie – the most critically admired of current Scottish film directors, and the hand behind The Last Great Wilderness (EIFF 2002), Young Adam (EIFF 2003) and Hallam Foe (EIFF 2007) – Spread is an LA-set comedy with a sleek surface and dark undertones. With nods to Midnight Cowboy (1969) and especially Shampoo (1975), it reverses the genders of the predominant sex-for-money movie, centring on a young man who accepts the patronage of wealthy, sexually neglected older women. Like any tart-with-a-heart, however, Kutcher's Nicki must ultimately lose his, and learn a lesson … though Spread keeps us guessing about what the moral of his particular story will be, as Nicki's relationship with the self-sufficient Heather (Margarita Levieva) takes some unexpected turns. With its richly polished surface, its spectacular high-end LA locations and its blend of high comedy with eroticism, Spread has an archness and a sophistication that mark interesting and unexpected progressions in Mackenzie's work (though it's not difficult to see the odd parallel with Young Adam, which also dealt, albeit in much rawer style, with a conscience-deficient, solitary protagonist whose one currency was sex). Yet for all the film's hip brittleness, its underlying tone is one of regret, on behalf of a generation that risks ejecting the sweet mystique from sex, and consigning hearts and bodies to the status of tools for self-advancement. Just how much Kutcher might identify with his character here – a gorgeous wastrel who gets by on his looks and skips before things get too deep – must remain a matter of speculation. Ironically, though, in playing a character with no depth whatsoever, he asserts himself as an actor of surprising range, and is well supported by Anne Heche as one of the more feisty of his moneyed marks.