A bullet named Brad Pitt

Cinema tells, with dedication and perseverance, how men like to transform themselves into projectiles. It's about cars, engines, and speed. But above all, it's about bodies and ballistics. Pilots are projectiles, and the weapons are rockets, speedboats, jets. Or, as in "F1": racing cars.

Over the course of 156 minutes, a racing car with Brad Pitt is loaded and fired at the audience. Joseph Kosinski, who previously directed "Top Gun: Maverick" (2022), fires fast and with a big caliber: a world championship, nine stages, and with each race increasing in commotion, drama, and risk.

Brad Pitt in the role of the old warhorse, Damson Idris as a young talent with a thirst for career success, Javier Bardem as a racing team owner with a sense of honor and money problems. Add to that a brilliant engineer (Kerry Condon) and a team that's initially skeptical but then fiercely loyal: This is the cast for a production that ticks off narrative boxes like a tourist bus ticks off its stops. But that doesn't matter, because the attraction here isn't created by dramaturgy, but by spectacle.

Watching "F1" means watching Brad Pitt, the most talented pin-up boy in modern cinema. Sure, he held his own in terms of conflicted, even shattered, virility – from "Seven" to "Fight Club" to "Babylon" – but it was always the glamour of his sexiness that set him apart from his generational peers. His career began in "Thelma & Louise" (1991) with an erotically charged vulgarity, and in this role, too, the hardware or body is the focal point. Brad Pitt is the epitome of the fetishized actor's body, just as the female physique was once the vanishing point of audience desire. Seen in this light, Pitt is the sum total of old sexism and post-feminist subversion.

The second body, whose visual appeal is exploited in "F1," making the screen smoke, is that of the racing car. Fueling cars with sexual stimuli is nothing new. Every Pirelli calendar exploits this logic. "F1," however, aestheticizes the machine to the point of being a work of art, and the scenes in which uniformed technicians prepare their racing cars have the charm of a performance. Engineers as curators and drivers as the stars of a happening: Joseph Kosinski at times succeeds in creating a scenario that, in a museum context, would pass as a moving image installation. Seen in this light, even the _CO2 -conscious e-biker can enjoy the film: as a visually effervescent celebration of mechanical beauty.

It's best to approach "F1" as a spiritual exercise. Just as semantics fizzle out from race to race like fuel in a cylinder, the action becomes charged with ballistic energies. It's nice that Brad Pitt plays this aging racing driver because the engine of his coolness continues to be self-irony and not, as with Tom Cruise, a pathological discipline. And the fact that Damson Idris really does have, as he says in the film himself, a charming smile and, moreover, confidently plays the role of the up-and-comer in the rat race of a sporting career – that, too, is nice to watch. But "F1" will be remembered, if at all, as the apotheosis of the accelerated body.

What does this film want to say about masculinity? It's perhaps best understood by a line from Brad Pitt at the end: As the victorious driver moves on—lone wolves do this after first disrupting a group, a community, a "system" with their stubbornness, then enriching it—he says: "I am a dragon slayer." Conservative masculinity, that is, masculinity that relies on values ​​like loyalty, fidelity, and even a sense of sacrifice, no longer fits well into a habitually fragmented, norm-critical, and socially finely chiseled reality. It belongs to the realm of myth and fantasy.

In the cinema.