As the sun rises over Hollywood today, there are creeps who look like Harvey Weinstein, D.J. Qualls and Steve Buscemi passing judgment on the appearance, sexual allure and filmic “fertility” of young women from all over the world who come there, aspiring to careers in show business.

And when the suitably talented, driven and most importantly gorgeous few get their big break, there are guys, young and very old, who look like Roger Ebert, Jeffrey Wells and me who pass judgment on their work, sometimes even mentioning their beauty or relative lack of it (a matter of preference) as they review films, pop records and TV shows.

French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat eviscerates that whole unsavory-to-the-point-of-sinister ecosystem with “The Substance,” a brutal, savage and savagely-funny satire that cuts to the chase and beats it to death.

It’s so on-target and “out there” and knowing that you figure our writer-director — best known for “Revenge” — must have had dashed acting stardom in her dreams at some point. There are traces of “The Player” in its warped values and view of the homely preying on the gorgeous. The production design and almost inhuman dissection of human failings bring to mind the pull-no-punches about humanity films of Stanley Kubrick.

And there are two actresses, rightly celebrated for “putting it all out there” by critics (mostly male) in performances that start out naked — Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are often unclothed — and venture into “stripped bare” in their versions of the frailty and insecurities of being famously beautiful but growing old, and the pitiless arrogance of the young, the “hot,” the “It girl” of the moment.

Demi Moore, over 60 and at the stage of the Hollywood game where Nicole Kidman appearance “refreshings” no longer have the desired effect, goes full Jamie Lee Curtis here. It’s a performance built on the insecurities of ageing in a business that has no mercy for women who do, and Moore, playing a former actress turned exercise show queen named Elisabeth Sparkle, lets us see the natural ravages of time.

Not at first. Sparkle, whose star we see placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, followed by the cracking and wear and tear that the years have on that star in an opening credit montage, keeps up appearances on camera.

Makeup and hair dye hide much. She’s still wearing the leotard, leading a younger crew of pretty women in dancersizes, a morning show “queen” to the vile network boss, played by Dennis Quaid, in his wildest, ugliest performance in decades.

There’s talk of “an Oscar” in her past, which we hear him laughingly dismiss as happening “in the ’30s” in a shockingly cruel phone call he takes at the urinal in unflattering extreme closeup. Elisabeth hears it, too.

All those posters promoting her show over the years, her “Sparkle your life” brand and her ratings mean nothing. “Young” is what matters the most, Mr. “I have to give the people what they want” insists. A horrific no-injury car-accident (stunningly created here) merely hastens the inevitable for her.

Elisabeth is out. But a secret tip is passed onto her in the emergency room. An almost AI-polished looking young man examines her, says she’d be a “good candidate,” and lets her go.

She finds a memory stick in her coat when she gets home. A video with vague promises of “rebirth” doesn’t impress her, until the network’s farewell bouquet of roses arrives.

Getting to “The Substance” distribution point requires a cryptic phone call, a back-alley entrance and a pass key. The script and the drug maker — illustrating its rebirth by showing chicken egg yolks replicating themselves after injection — leaves the “science” and everything about it sketchy, underground and beautifully under-explained.

The box with the syringes and the drug is similarly lacking in detailed instructions. But Elisabeth shoots up like the Hollywood veteran she is, and as her nude body collapses onto her pristine, “2001” inspired bathroom floor, the promised “another version of yourself” tears through her spine, with all the blood and ickiness that entails.

Elisabeth has a fresh start, with a new body (Qualley) and a chance to do it all over again, this time with the wisdom of decades in Hollywood to guide her.

Sure, it’s deliciously apt in a screenwriterly sense that young “Sue” as she calls herself will audition for and land the job as her own replacement, doing a younger, stripper-pole sexy version of Elisabeth’s exercise show. But is that the limit of her ambition?

Then we remember the solitude, the loneliness of fading stardom over 60 that we’ve seen. We can sense what Elisabeth went through to get here, the humiliations and moral compromises. And we can see the emptiness of “fame” even if she never does. In the dark recesses of her monomaniacal soul, getting “back” is more important than getting whole or rebuilding a film career.

All she has to do is follow the “rules” — be the “matrix” version of herself for seven days, then switch to the “better version” via an exchange of fluids — and follow them to the letter.

“Remember, there is no ‘she’ and ‘me.’ You are one.”

We can guess how that works out, and what’s coming. “Sue,” the new “you,” gets all the attention and wants more of the time. No “seven days” off. And so on.

Every science fiction story about any version of “The Fountain of Youth” dwells on the regrets, the loneliness of losing some of yourself as you lose loved ones and abandon the physical manifestations of “life experience.” Fargeat seriously shortchanges that, but gets at it in a single scene where Elisabeth’s resentment at the invisibility of old age has her trying to summon up the courage to meet with an old high school classmate for drinks.

She hasn’t the guts. She’s all-in on the value system that abused her and tossed her aside.

Moore’s performance is unfiltered and fierce, manic at times, a tour de force turn and maybe even her career best. Qualley is similarly invested if not quite as showy. Quaid’s delicious villainy is like icing on the cake, Every Overdressed Exec who ever aged way beyond the point where he has any business commenting on anyone else’s appearance.

The satire is aimed at the youth-obsession and narrow parameters of beauty in Hollywood, but by extension we see the cruelty of the process — trolls and gargoyles, sitting at a table in an empty audition room, making snap judgments about sex appeal on actors at their most vulnerable.

This is the darkest takedown of Hollywood since “The Player” or “Swimming with Sharks.”

“The Substance” can be a bit much, at times. The violence is horrific, the nudity — each “version” of our heroine is left on the bathroom floor, naked, while the other one takes over — gratuitous, at times.

And the film rather outstays its welcome, stumbling on past a legitimate climax or two.

But Fargeat found something worth saying and she says it, in unblinking close-ups and uncensored “This is how we look when we age” bluntness. It’s seriously sick to spend all this cultural bandwidth on embracing the “fresh,” the “new” and the “young” as our yardstick for beauty and relevence. It’s even sicker to think how most of us buy into that and the extremes we make women go through to prolong it.

Rating: R, graphic, gory violence, nudity

Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid

Credits: Scripted and directed by Coralie Fargeat. A Mubi release.

Running time: 2:21