Lee Simon is an unsuccessful novelist turned travel writer who immerses himself in celebrity journalism following a midlife crisis and subsequent divorce from his insecure wife, Robin, a former English teacher, after sixteen years of marriage.

As he stumbles his way through both professional encounters and sexual escapades with performers, models, and other players in the world of entertainment, Lee increasingly questions his purpose in life.

[5] Janet Maslin of The New York Times observed, "Lee Simon is one of the filmmaker's wearier creations, in ways that deny Celebrity the bracing audacity of recent, better Allen films like Deconstructing Harry and Everyone Says I Love You.

And even with Branagh as his younger alter ego, Allen finds no way to revitalize the character's predictable worries about advancing his career and chasing beautiful women ...

"[7] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone felt the film "suffers from lulls and lapses and one lulu of a casting gaffe, but this keenly observant spoof of the fame game is hardly the work of a burnout.

"[8] Edward Guthmann of the San Francisco Chronicle stated, "Branagh stammers, bobs his head and runs the gamut of other established Woody tics and mannerisms – delivering nervous shtick where a performance would have sufficed.

Judy Davis's doorstepping television interviews in the Jean-Georges restaurant where she encounters several well-heeled New Yorkers, including Donald Trump (who is planning to buy St Patrick's Cathedral and knock it down) are frankly risible; a rehearsal scene in the Ziegfeld Theatre where [Winona Ryder] is being coached in the art of seducing a woman (gasp!)

Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi's turn as a lionised New York artist complaining at his opening at the Serge Sorokko Gallery in SoHo that fame will ruin him, is simply banal.