At The Movies: In Asteroid City, Wes Anderson drops into a golden-age America of the imagination

Asteroid City (M18)

105 minutes, opens on Thursday

4 stars

The story: It is 1955. Somewhere in the American Southwest, a car pulls to a stop in the tiny town of Asteroid City. From it emerges Augie (Jason Schwartzman), a photojournalist, along with his four kids. He is here so that his son can receive a science prize, along with other gifted children from across the United States. It is revealed that all this is taking place in the mind of celebrated playwright Conrad Earp (Edward Norton) as he writes his new play. 

From the synopsis, it is clear that this is a movie about the act of storytelling. But that is true of nearly every recent project from American film-maker Wes Anderson, a creator who pours everything he loves about visual design and still photography into every film.

Not a square centimetre of the frame escapes his attention in this new project. There is a conceptual playfulness at work too.

This is a nested story. As Augie’s story unfolds in Asteroid City, the audience is told that his world exists inside a play of the same title, and both are nested inside something else.

Without giving too much away, the third layer involves actor Bryan Cranston playing a certain kind of instantly recognisable 1950s entertainment figure. 

Anderson likes his nests. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) has a three-level structure. The main story depicts events that are detailed in a chat between a writer (played by Jude Law) and a hotel owner (F. Murray Abraham), before it is shown that the writer and hotel owner are characters in a novel. 

In Asteroid City, Anderson goes further. Instead of having writer Earp narrate the world inhabited by Augie, the two worlds are on separate paths.

Narratively, things get complicated. Repeat viewings might reveal echoes and allusions, but at times, this reviewer gets whiplash from being yanked back and forth between the characters and the actors – who are themselves characters – playing the characters. 

People do not watch Anderson for his conceptual cleverness, however. They go to experience something that feels like dance choreography on a two-dimensional stage.

There is plenty of that heightened reality here, mostly in the Augie story, which channels two of the writer-director’s loves – 1950s American futurism and, to a lesser extent, the look of the cowboy movie. 

Every scene is a heartfelt love letter to the age of ray guns, rocket ships and the belief that, with science, anything is possible.

There are a couple of moments when it feels like kitsch – an archetypal 1950s diner, or “luncheonette”, is a pivotal setting – but you cannot blame Anderson for that.

If mid-century Americana feels over-familiar and over-quoted, it is because it conquered the world. 

Hot take: With its multi-level storytelling structure and endless parade of A-list actors making cameos, this production can feel more like a Vanity Fair bumper issue than a movie. Anderson wrests control to deliver a sincere ode to a lost age of American innocence.