Actor Nellie LaRoy just can’t take it anymore.

She’s tried to keep her composure at the fancy party, tried to hold her tongue and act the “lady,” but these people, with all their airs and finery, have pushed her too far. And some rich creep keeps grabbing her rear.

The Jersey in her comes out swinging.

Nellie unleashes a furious rant, but that’s not all. Full of hors d’oeuvres and nauseated by nerves and pretense, she spews projectile vomit all over the genteel Hollywood crowd.

The “wild child” silent film star, played to the hilt by Margot Robbie in the new movie “Babylon,” just cannot stomach the fake, pompous elite.

“It’s the character of the rebel iconoclast outsider who doesn’t really get along well with high society or mainstream polite opinion all the time and chafes against those boundaries, and often violently,” says director Damien Chazelle.

“Babylon,” in theaters Dec. 23, is a movie about people on the margins who are thrust into the spotlight in early Hollywood, with explosive consequences.

Nellie’s Jersey identity isn’t about playing an accent. It’s part of what gives her the swagger and boldness to make her mark in the movies — the same kind of brazen spirit that fueled early filmmakers who pioneered their craft in the state, Chazelle tells NJ Advance Media.

“Initially, it was sort of drawing from my own background and childhood, and felt like a nice way to work a Jersey shoutout in,” says the filmmaker, 37, who grew up in Princeton. “The important thing with the character was this idea that she’d be a true outsider when she arrives in Los Angeles.”

At 32, Chazelle became the youngest recipient of the Oscar for best director for his high-flying movie musical “La La Land” (2016).

“Babylon,” an ambitious three-hour epic, is set in the heady, pre-pre-Code days of Hollywood and the transition to talkies. The director, inspired by the real movers and shakers of the industry, takes the “silent” out of silent film.

Chazelle obscures any notion of stuffy decorum in a bid to express the fullest range of spectacle — gross-out gags and lurid bacchanalia made for a reported $78 million production budget (per Variety).

The Paramount Pictures movie, co-starring Diego Calva (“Narcos: Mexico”) and Brad Pitt in a supporting role, starts in 1926 with a deluge of elephant excrement that assaults the camera and continues with orgies, massive mounds of cocaine and chaotic, lethal film sets, winding down in 1952 to the dulcet tones of “Singin’ in the Rain.”

This is the kind of meta movie about the movies best experienced in a theater, both for sensory and storytelling purposes. (The best way to hear every splash of feces.) The audience, and their reaction, is intended to be part of the narrative.

“Babylon,” even without the many fun, comedic bells and whistles, is a story about outsiders converging in Hollywood, where the spotlight finds them and can just as quickly abandon them. Careers fade, but film is forever, and they want a piece of that immortality.

The film, written by Chazelle, is up for five Golden Globes, including best motion picture - musical or comedy. Best actress nominee Robbie (“I, Tonya,” “Bombshell”), 32, is almost certainly headed for a third Oscar nomination for her scintillating turn as Nellie.

Like Nellie, protagonist Manny Torres — played by Calva, 30, who was nominated for the Golden Globe for best actor — is a wide-eyed, albeit much more understated, outsider. He just wants to soak it all in. When he meets Nellie, it’s like he’s looking into the face of Hollywood and falling so deeply in love he can never imagine a life without.

The Mexican American character gives us a view of early show business from the bottom up — literally. He labors to push an elephant uphill to a party when the animal unleashes a torrent of dung. If that doesn’t deter him from a career in the movies, little will.

Manny — partly inspired by cinematographer and director Enrique Juan Vallejo, a Mexican immigrant, and filmmaker René Cardona, a Cuban immigrant who also worked in Mexico — gets a foothold in the business as a fixer’s assistant, then ascends to become a studio executive.

Hollywood dreams ... and nightmares

Other “Babylon” outsiders who find the spotlight — and its implications — include Lady Fay Zhu, played by Li Jun Li (“Wu Assassins,” “Quantico”).

Fay, inspired by Anna May Wong and Marlene Dietrich, is a charismatic, cabaret-style singer and performer punished for her sexual identity.

Jazz trumpeter Sidney Palmer, played by Jovan Adepo (”Watchmen,” “The Leftovers”), is propelled to become a screen star with the introduction of sound films. But the Black musician feels Hollywood’s grim underbelly when he’s asked to wear blackface to “match” the complexions of his band.

“The Jazz Singer” — the 1927 movie starring Al Jolson in blackface and the first feature film to use spoken dialogue via synchronized sound — is a watershed moment in “Babylon.” The silent-talkie turning point is also how the story references classic movie musical “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Chazelle depicts the rough learning curve for capturing sound as a tedious process that required take after hellish take. “Babylon” producer Olivia Hamilton, Chazelle’s wife, weathers the transition as director Ruth Adler in a hilarious meltdown scene with assistant director Max, played by Old Tappan actor P.J. Byrne.

Actor Jack Conrad, a bankable leading man, is played by someone who knows a little something about the subject: Brad Pitt.

The Oscar winner joins his “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” castmate Robbie as a silent film star who likes to work hard and play hard — unfortunately at the same time. Jack takes credit for helping to elevate screen actors to celebrities. But as sound films take over, studio executives write him off.

Emmy winner Jean Smart (HBO Max’s “Hacks”) is the insider’s insider as powerful Hollywood columnist Elinor St. John. Chazelle based the character on writers like Louella Parsons, Elinor Glyn and Adela Rogers St. Johns.

Smart’s commanding scene with Pitt’s fading actor delivers part of the film’s thesis: If Jack, Nellie and Manny want a piece of forever, they are going to have to pay the price.

Along the way, the film introduces us to a full ensemble of characters played by its own motley crew, including Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea as studio fixer Bob Levine, actor-director Olivia Wilde as Jack’s perturbed wife Ina and “Babylon” executive producer Tobey Maguire as unhinged casino owner James McKay.

From Jersey to ‘La La Land’

Chazelle was born in Providence, Rhode Island, before moving to Princeton.

His mother, Celia Chazelle, is a professor of medieval history at The College of New Jersey in Ewing (this reporter is a former student). His father, Bernard Chazelle, a native of France, is a computer science professor at Princeton University. His sister, actor, writer and director Anna Chazelle, appears in his films.

Before Damien could write, he’d tell stories with pictures. A passion for film ran in the family: His maternal grandfather, John Martin, had roles in Hollywood. In a bit of cinematic serendipity, during the silent film era, his maternal great-grandfather worked as a manager at the London arm of Paramount Pictures, the same big studio behind “Babylon.”

Chazelle set off on his own “outsider” journey to Los Angeles after conceiving his debut feature, the Boston-set “Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench,” when he was a Harvard University student.

The director’s first Oscar nod arrived in 2015 for his “Whiplash” screenplay, inspired by his experience as a drummer in the competitive jazz band at Princeton High.

Two years later, Chazelle made Oscars history with “La La Land.” His next movie, “First Man” (2018), took him to the moon via Ryan Gosling’s Neil Armstrong.

As rousing big band music and insistent trumpet announce early on in “Babylon,” the Hollywood epic sees Chazelle reteam with composer Justin Hurwitz. His Harvard roommate and former bandmate has worked with him since “Guy and Madeline,” winning two Oscars for “La La Land.”

Chazelle also reunited with Oscar-winning “La La Land” and “First Man” cinematographer Linus Sandgren.

Their vision of the madcap magnificence of early filmmaking can be intoxicating — spectacle upon spectacle, a bare desert canvas for leading ladies, medieval knights and sweaty directors chasing one last shot before the sun goes down.

New Jersey: Party crasher, party starter

Robbie’s Nellie makes her entrance in “Babylon” by literally — yes, again — crashing a party.

She nearly drives a car into the manse where a Hollywood heavyweight is throwing the rager.

The fearless dreamer, careening in with a plunging red dress and loose, wavy hair atypical of the period (more 2012 than 1926), introduces herself like a screen siren. She doesn’t have a single film credit to her name, but her uninhibited, crowd-surfing antics score her a role.

She craves attention because of a past that haunts her — it’s why she can cry on command. All she has to do, she says, is think of home.

Chazelle modeled Nellie’s firecracker persona on a young Joan Crawford, Clara Bow and other silent film stars like Lya de Putti, Mary Nolan and Thelma Todd.

“The thing I liked about Jersey for her was that it maintained as big a distance as you can have from LA that you would get from some of the real-life actors that she was loosely based on,” the director says.

Nellie is a lively character, not just a signifier, but she also seems to represent Hollywood’s New Jersey origin story.

The film business took root in Fort Lee at the turn of the century.

However, by the time Nellie crashes the party in the 1920s, the industry had, like Chazelle’s tempest of a starlet, ditched its Jersey digs for Hollywood.

“Especially being from Jersey and growing up knowing some of those early film days stories, the Edison workshops and some of the early Jersey shooting, it is a part of the early cinema history that isn’t as well known,” Chazelle says.

Pitt’s Jack mentions how film was once seen as a low profession.

“It’s not really an art form that’s initially thought of as belonging to the heights of, say, New York City,” Chazelle says. “It almost makes sense, metaphorically, that it would be just off the city limits out in Jersey.”

‘Vulgar art’ becomes art of the masses

But it wasn’t just the promise of Hollywood’s fair weather that drove directors out of the Garden State.

The course of filmmaking forever changed when Thomas Edison, who in 1893 opened the first film studio, Black Maria in West Orange — and later, Edison Studios — entered into a trust with Eastman Kodak and major film studios and distributors.

The 1908 monopoly enforced licenses for use of Edison cameras and Kodak film, suffocating independent production and hastening an exodus to California.

“This idea that Hollywood itself was born from outcasts — you could even call them outlaws, running from the laws of the patent trust, people fleeing for one reason or another from where they came from — it’s this idea of an industry in a town built by misfits of various stripes,” Chazelle says.

“I think it’s sort of baked into the DNA of what the bigger movie industry became, and the bigger idea of movies as an art form.”

As for Chazelle’s art, much more is on the way.

The director and Hamilton, his partner in life and film, just signed a first-look deal with Paramount Pictures for their production company, Wild Chickens Productions.

Hamilton, a Princeton alum who married Chazelle in 2018, also just gave birth to their second child.

As director Ruth Adler in “Babylon,” she utters two words that silent film enthusiasts may detect as a historical reference:

“Be natural.”

French director Alice Guy-Blaché, an early 1900s film pioneer in Fort Lee who became the first woman to run a movie studio, once posted a sign that bore those same words — it was her message to actors.

Chazelle laughs.

“Alice Guy-Blaché was definitely one of the key people I was modeling Ruth after,” Chazelle says. “Lois Weber was another one. And then, a little bit later into the end of the silent era, Dorothy Arzner was another one. ...

“I have to admit I did not think of that specific callback. Now I’ll take credit for that Easter egg, that’s brilliant.”

“Babylon,” which runs 3 hours and 8 minutes, is rated R for strong and crude sexual content, graphic nudity, bloody violence, drug use and pervasive language. The film opens wide Friday, Dec. 23.

Please consider supporting NJ.com with a subscription. Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at akuperinsky@njadvancemedia.com and followed at @AmyKup on Twitter.