If you’re a Steve Buscemi fan, and who isn’t, you can’t afford to miss “Delirious,” a biting satire/buddy comedy from director Tom DiCillo that features our man Steve in a classic Buscemi role as a paparazzo.

DiCillo wrote the part of Les Galantine for Buscemi, and it fits him like a glove. He’s a bottom feeder, even in the slimy world of the paparazzi, grabbing gift bags at events to harvest the freebies, taking any paltry sum for his photos and living in a fleabag  apartment in New York’s Chinatown.

But Les sees himself as something of a philosopher and a tough guy, believing, he says, that he’s no different and no worse than the celebrities he and his camera-wielding colleagues stalk.

Enter Toby (Michael Pitt), a young homeless man and wannabe actor who runs across the paparazzi herd as they stake out a restaurant trying to get a shot of K’Harma Leeds (Alison Lohman), a Britney Spears-like pop star, and her equally famous boyfriend. The mission is a failure, in part because Toby is in the wrong place at the right time.

But he follows Les home, ostensibly to give him some change left over from buying coffee, and talks him into a place to live in exchange for becoming his unpaid assistant.

Together they hit the party circuit and follow the stars, with Toby assisting Les in getting a shot that actually pays. Then things change when pretty boy Toby catches the eye of K’Harma and gets pulled into a far different world than the one in which Les lives.

That creates plenty of bitterness and gives the movie some of its late bite. But it has stinging humor throughout, both in the relationship between the prickly, nasty, ultimately self-loathing Les and the sweetly charming Toby.

This is the kind of role that Buscemi is made for, and he’s at the peak of his form, managing to be both irritating and sympathetic and creating in-character humor in the process. Much of that comes from the contrast with Pitt, whose beauty is used to its full advantage and who displays a subtle skill for dry comedy throughout.

In that sense, “Delirious” is an old-style buddy movie that doesn’t require guns or sports to link the characters. But DiCillo is aiming at bigger prey and deftly skewers all levels of the celebrity world. In addition to Lohman’s ambitious but easily manipulated star, there are fawning publicists, egotistic directors, a seductive casting agent (Gina Gershon in a great, if brief, appearance), the ever-present paparazzi and even Elvis Costello.

“Delirious” has some dull moments, primarily when it turns sentimental. But it’s mostly good fun, especially for Buscemi fans who’ll get to see their man in all his disheveled, put-upon, bitter glory.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.