I can pinpoint the exact moment in Joseph Kosinski’s F1 when I knew this movie had me hook, line, and sinker. It comes quick, in the film’s “prologue,” long before Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) gets behind the open wheel in a grand prix, back when he’s still just wandering around the racing Earth, to paraphrase Tarantino, like Caine in Kung Fu. He was hot shit years and years ago, battling Ayrton Senna in his debut race in Formula One, before a massive crash thwarted those dreams. A string of bad marriages, bad career choices (becoming a professional gambler has the side effect of often ruining your credit), and mid-level racing jobs kept him afloat in the thirty years since. When we meet him, just before that hallowed moment, he’s heading to the track at Daytona, shaking off a rough nap before his leg of an endurance race. His back hurts – a lingering reminder of his glory days and how that went to shit. It’s the middle of the night. The grandstands are nearly empty. He’ll be on the track for hours and hours. If he wins, he’ll make five grand – a paltry sum compared to the riches and other prestige given to a driver when he’s in the upper echelons of the racing world. He lives in a van. There’s only one question to ask: Why? Why’s he still doing this?
When he pulls out on the track inside a stock car, we find out: Almost immediately, he’s thrown into a high-speed conflict with another driver. Kosinski keeps the pace up, shooting the on-ground action like he shot the footage in Top Gun: Maverick in the air, prioritizing our immersion as if we were on a ride-along. The roars of each engine are deafening (I got at least 20 “loud noise” warnings from my Apple Watch throughout the film), the pace is quick, the action is clearly staged, the cuts are emphatic (for example, a quick cut to fiery brakes during the heat of the moment), and you start to wonder if the theater’s got the fans on their AC up too high. No, that’s just the phantom wind rushing through your hair. It’s good – great, even – but not magical.
And then it happens: Kosinski pulls back, showing the battle in an IMAX-wide shot, and the fireworks go off, illuminating the palm trees that line the course. He then jumps back to the track, sparks rolling across the hoods of the battling cars, the entire track lit up for a brief moment like the Florida sun woke up for a midnight snack. That shot was when I fell in love with F1. It’s the kind of moment Tony Scott would have had tears streaming down his face while shooting or that John Frankenheimer would have tried to capture if he were making Grand Prix for present-day motorsport. Moreover, it’s the kind of moment, stuffed to the gills with the iconography of American racing, that makes someone like this shit in the first place: the “huh, that seems… cool,” one has when they see a Daytona USA cabinet in the arcade as a kid.
Yeah, fuck the box office tracking or “Apple’s Folly” stuff. This here, folks, is a rave. F1 is one of the best sports movies of the decade, if not the century, because of how indelible moments like this blend with a clever script and a whole host of charismatic performers in front of the camera. Fully titled F1®: The Movie (which, now that it’s been acknowledged, will exclusively be referred to as F1 for the duration of this review), Kosinski and co-writer Ehren Kruger have crafted a bizarrely plausible scenario to get the aging Pitt behind the open wheel, and a more reasonable one for how a last-place team on the grid could eventually make their way towards the podium throughout a season. That’s not to say it’s possible, mind you – just that it doesn’t feel as if Movie® Magic® were the only thrust guiding the APXGP team toward greatness and glory. In the real world, there’s no way for guys like Sonny, only brought on because his friend Ruben (Javier Barden) runs the team and they need someone to fill a seat, and Noah (Damson Idris), a young firebrand who feels the pressures of “stardom” and is fully distracted by them, to compete with the Red Bulls and Ferraris and McLarens of the world. Not only do they not have the money to muster a challenge, but if you put these two drivers together —the old-timer with old-school values and the platonic ideal of the modern Formula 1 superstar —call an ambulance and poison control, because it’d be like mixing ammonia and bleach.
Yet this is, after all, a movie that conforms to audience expectations – do you think the heir apparent to Redford would have his Natural end with how Bernard Malmud’s novel ended? A downer? Hell no, Roy Hobbs is going to crush a dinger into the right field lights after saying “fuck you” to the bookies. These guys, with the help of their team engineer (the always-delightful Kerry Condon), are gonna find a way to get along, with Sonny’s calculated-risk style of driving (“Plan C,” as he calls it) becoming a kind of team mantra. If they can’t beat Max Verstappen on the straights, then they’ll engineer their car to fight him in the curves. They’ll scan for every loophole in the book and run in into the ground until the stewards finally notice and dock them points. As such, Kosinski and Kruger have done what I thought was truly and fully impossible: They utilize the rules and team-centric nature of Formula One as an asset, not as an exposition-laden cross they have to bear. This, truly, is a Yank problem. I fully doubt that even the most dedicated Drive to Survive viewer, who tunes in for the documentary’s new seasons on the day the episodes drop, would be able to quote line-and-verse from the F1 rulebook in the same way that an immersed-from-birth European fan would be, but the pair don’t leave anyone behind.
Take, for instance, the way in which “Plan C” is first deployed: Exploiting a quirk in the F1 rules, Sonny brings out the Safety Car at several key points to propel Noah higher and higher through the leaderboard. If, coming out of the pit lane, Noah’s able to beat the car in front of him to the track, the other driver will have to yield and allow him to pass. It’s repeated several times – the first time, it looks just like another disaster that seems to plague the early days of Sonny’s return to the track. The second it happens, the F1 diehards will start to get it. By the third time, the more observant members of the audience will. The fourth, everyone will understand, will be laughing at Pitt’s perfunctory “oops” as he fender-bends another Haas car, and the race will be on its merry way toward its conclusion. Couple that with Kosinski’s style – the realer-than-real Tony Scott aesthetic adapted for modern digital cameras and the Apple Store aesthetics of the present-day racing team – and you have a film that never once asks you to turn off your brain in order to enjoy either its aesthetic or its storytelling. It turns out that you can have both every once in a while.
It’s just a shame that Kosinski seems like the last director working in proper big-budget Hollywood (who isn’t under the direct employ of Tom Cruise any longer) who understands what it means to have a goddamn Movie Star as a leading man. F1 is built around Pitt doing more of what he and Quentin Tarantino perfected in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is, as expected, a fucking delight. All I really wanted from this movie was the chance to see Cliff Booth cause chaos in European Days of Thunder, and I got even more than bargained for. His charisma is captured so perfectly by Kosinski, who understands Pitt’s appeal as an actor almost as strongly as he understood Cruise’s, and he repurposes the power dynamics and story from Maverick with only a few minor alterations.
Here’s a man whose life was ruined in a split-second, who never fully got to heal from that one moment as much as he might wish he had, given a second chance by an old friend, who goes on to mentor the kid that’ll take his place (Idris is also a perfect foil to Pitt, reactive where the latter is cool, and the pair are given enough time to gain respect for each other in a way that doesn’t feel contrived). It says something about Kosinski’s skills as a storyteller that he’s able to present this formula to us as if it were brand-new and not just what he gave us last time around – it would certainly pass my equivalent of the Pepsi Challenge when placed in a blind taste-test with Maverick. Plus, someone gave Hans Zimmer the Challengers score and told him “just do this,” continuing his streak of doing good work only for guys like Kosinski and Dennis Villeneuve.
But like Maverick, F1 is never, ever boring. The schedule of a Formula One season ensures that the next race always comes at a fast clip, where we can join Sonny and Noah behind their wheels and fly across the grid. The Mann and Frankenheimer-inspired camera angles ensure that we’re immersed in the action in a way that feels close-to-tactile, and the name of the game is full immersion. One shot – a tour-de-force moment – puts us directly inside Sonny’s helmet as the five lights fade from the countdown timer and the race starts. The subtle head movements inform you where to look, but the scene challenges your perspective and reaction time, putting you right in the moment, in which the complexity of Sonny’s task becomes clear.
There’s an old dad-like pithy adage about how a NASCAR broadcast is just a bunch of drivers turning left for 300 laps, and the distance a camera provides helps elide the fact that you’re going, oh, 200 MPH. Make a minor mistake, and ten seconds later, you and 10 other of your fellow drivers will not only be out of the race but most likely on fire and/or horribly injured. This is what Kosinski’s emphasizing here: You have to be crazy to do something this dangerous. But without that danger, without that risk, there is no way to reach that great, ephemeral reward. Not victory. Sonny won’t even hold the trophy when it’s all said and done. Bad luck. What you need is speed. The closest you can get on land to flight. The moment when man and machine push the limits of the possible and the zen flow takes over. That’s why people race, that’s what Kosinski accurately captures through his filmmaking, and it’s why F1 is one of the best movies of the summer, if not the year.