The full title of Brad Pitt's new Formula One racing film is F1 the Movie, which is helpful, given the sheer range of F1-themed programming there is, from livestreamed races to documentary series. But it's also a little misleading. There's been no shortage of memorable F1 movies over the years, like the 1967 Grand Prix and the 1971 Steve McQueen drama Le Mans. Among more recent titles, I'm a big fan of Rush, about the real-life racing rivals James Hunt and Niki Lauda, and Senna, a wrenching documentary portrait of the three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna.
It's probably too early to welcome F1 into that pantheon, but this slick, precision-tooled entertainment is clearly gunning for a spot. The movie, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is hugely enjoyable and dazzlingly well-made. And it does for the 61-year-old Brad Pitt what Kosinski's last film, Top Gun: Maverick, did for Tom Cruise: It casts him as a stubborn outsider who shows he's still got a surprise and maybe even a triumph up his sleeve.
Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, who was a rising Formula One star in the '90s, until a devastating crash sidelined his career. Thirty years later, Sonny is a professional gambler and occasional race-car driver for hire. He'll drive for any team that needs him, not for the chump change he gets paid, but for his enduring love of the sport.
The plot kicks into gear when Ruben, an old friend and racing buddy, played by a boisterous Javier Bardem, shows up out of the blue and begs Sonny to drive for his struggling Formula One racing team, Apex. Sonny reluctantly agrees and heads to Apex headquarters in London, but immediately clashes with the team's other driver, the much younger Joshua Pearce, played by Damson Idris.
Joshua is a bit of a hothead, and he resents being tied to a has-been like Sonny. But Sonny, whom Pitt plays with a signature mix of aloofness and swagger, has years more experience, and he knows how to use that experience to get under Joshua's skin. As the film leaps from one Grand Prix race to another — the destinations include Monza, Italy; Las Vegas; and Abu Dhabi — the men's rivalry heats up, on and off the course. At one point, Sonny pulls a move that ends up wrecking both his and Joshua's cars, sending Ruben into an understandable fury.
You don't have to know a thing about cars, racetracks or Formula One regulations to guess where this epic of male aggression is headed. It's a safe bet that Sonny and Joshua will learn to work together, and that one or both of them will be injured on the long road to victory. It's also not a surprise when Apex's technical director, Kate, played by the terrific Kerry Condon, generates romantic sparks with Sonny, against their better professional judgment.
But if the overall arc of F1 is fairly predictable, the movie is good at keeping you off-balance from moment to moment. At times, it seems to borrow its philosophy from Sonny, who believes that success is often counterintuitive: You have to slow down to speed up, and sometimes, you even have to crash out to come in first.
After seeing Kosinski's earlier action movies, like Tron: Legacy and Oblivion, I came away thinking he was little more than an empty stylist. But his film craft here, as in Top Gun: Maverick, is awfully impressive. The racing scenes, beautifully shot by Claudio Miranda and crisply edited by Stephen Mirrione, are at once hyperkinetic and elegant; the crosscutting is insane, but you never get lost. Pitt and Idris did their own driving, reaching speeds of up to 180 miles per hour, which only adds to the verisimilitude.
It takes more than sterling action technique, though, to put across a movie like F1 persuasively. It takes a filmmaker who can deftly juggle male-weepie conventions and movie-star egos, and who can take the most cliché of Hollywood narratives — the aging veteran giving it one more go — and invest it with real feeling.
Interestingly, F1 only goes soft when it saddles Sonny with a lovely but redundant monologue about what he gets out of racing and why he finds it so thrilling. It briefly halts the movie in its tracks, which brings unwelcome meaning to the term "Pitt stop."
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