Glamorous entertainment with excellent production values. Perhaps enough to sneak into my Top 10 Films in English, especially when I focus on the exhilarating flying sequences and period recreations. HH's pop mythology provides more than enough interesting material for 169 minutes. I bought into these actors playing these engaging characters so casting and acting are a non-issue for me. That aside, let's get into some issues raised and a couple of new ones.

*Bix calling the film "distressingly impersonal" prompted me to ask myself: What is it that makes it a Scorsese film? Assuming everything else remains the same, how is the resulting film different than The Aviator as directed by say...Ridley Scott or Michael Mann? Don't assume that I found fault with Marty's direction, I'm just trying to locate his signature.

*I find myself more comfortable discussing the film's "limitations" than its "weaknesses" or "flaws". Seems to me that the filmmakers have accomplished what they set out to do, but as far as content (I'm speaking here mostly about the script) The Aviator is not very ambitious. Bix (again) refers to Logan's script as "workman, easy-solution" and "too reductive". This resonates with me. The film consists of legendary moments of HH's public persona (pop mythology), depiction of his obsessive/compulsive symptoms and his dealing with knowing he's not "normal", and one little bit of conjecture (as far I know): a brief opening scene that some (especially those unfamiliar with OCD etiology) will use to blame it all on mom. Bix and his wife are too wise and knowing to fall into the trap. It would've been better to excise it all together, rather than mislead the lay audience _OCD symptoms may be trigerred by environmental cues and stress, but the cause is, to a large extent, faulty "brain chemistry".
The film strives to elide the controversial (his drug addiction post-accident, for instance), the complicated (his politics, including reaction to the HUAC), and "messy" stuff such as whether anyone got hurt or killed when he crashed the XF-11 and how that information was kept from the public.