"Fame. What's your name?"

Remember when David Bowie posed that musical question?

Sacha Baron Cohen answers that riddle for us in one word: Brüno.

Crass, rude and preposterously funny, Brüno is the prince of mince: A frolicking cacophony of fashionista ineptitude that begs us to ask "What's up!?***"

• 'Bruno' and its mockumentary predecessors
• CTV.ca Trailers: Bruno

Leopard hot pants, perfect blonde highlights, collagen-pouty lips, over-the-top attitude...Brüno's as flamboyant a narcissist as Hollywood has ever seen. God knows there have been many.

From head to toe this unflappable poseur takes to the screen like God's gift to mankind, or at least to the Asian toy boy who Brüno amorously hurls about at the film's outset.

Jackhammer-like dildo machines, champagne poured from his lover's ass...This baron of bad taste doesn't stop there.

To his utter pride and credit Brüno is a go-getting fame whore who chases celebrity faster than Jonas Salk discovered the first polio vaccine.

As the star of "Funkyzeit," a trashy, Euro TV fashion show, he swans into Fashion Week. He scores backstage "exclusives" with supermodels who moan about their "tough" jobs.

"Making turns on the catwalk are hard, yaaaah?" he nods, his glazed gaze flickering with feigned empathy.

We know what Brüno's really thinking: "Give me the heels, bitch, and I'll show you how it's done."

The biggest Austrian superstar since...

Shallow? Mean-spirited?  Absolutely. Isn't everybody these days? That's the question Cohen fearlessly puts before us as this shameless caper takes off.

Thanks to one of the greatest wardrobe malfunctions of all time, in which his Velcro suit ruins a Fashion Week backdrop and destroys a show, Brüno is "schwartzlisted" to D-grade celeb status.

Dumped by his boyfriend and with nary a paparazzo in sight to snap his fabulouslness after the fiasco, the disgraced diva flees to Los Angeles with his adoring assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammarsten ). Their mission: Make Brüno "the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler."

Brüno's quest for über-stardom is fraught with lunacy, as anyone would expect from Cohen's follow-up to "Borat."

What Cohen and director Larry Charles deliver, however, pushes Hollywood's comedic envelope a long, jaw-dropping way.

Determined to become Tinseltown's hottest celebrity interviewer, the attention-craving wannabe gets Paula Abdul to speak to him, using Mexican labourers as chairs and tables during the interview.

Brüno lures Republican congressman Ron Paul into a hotel room, hopeful that their assignation will land him in the middle of a scandalous sex tape.

Hey, it worked for Paris Hilton. Why not Brüno?

The indomitable star-chaser flies to the Middle East to solve its peace problems and confuses humus with Hamas along the way. 

Poor bastard.

Inspired by Tom Cruise's "straight" appeal, Brüno endures homosexual "curing" sessions with two Alabama ministers. He even adopts an African baby (one he transports to L.A. in a cardboard box) in hopes that some celestial Angelina or Madonna stardust will fall on him.

"I gave him like a tradtional African name: O.J.," Brüno blithely tells an infuriated talk show audience.

Wunderbar!

From start to finish Brüno never gives up. He's an achiever. A guy with a dream. He follows it with a dogged determination that would make Barack Obama's run for the White House seem wanting.

And throughout all the insanity he tosses racial slurs, dildos and his penis at us faster than he can get a hot wax strip off his bikini line.

"Brüno" isn't the kind of movie your granny will want to see.

Its gonzo wackiness isn't cute and cuddly like a Monty Python skit.

The "Borat"-like set-ups with Abdul, Paul, Harrison Ford and other stars also make the bull detectors in our heads go off screaming.

Yet with "Brüno" Cohen gives us a breathless, hardcore comedy that says volumes about just how far people will go today to get famous.

Brüno may lack every positive trait humans should aspire to own. But by the time this flick wraps the difference between Brüno and millions of fame-obsessed North Americans is a just a pair of leopard hot pants and a few beauty appointments for some anal bleaching.

Three stars out of four