Heading into “F1,” a high-octane, ‘rise from the ashes’ star vehicle, Brad Pitt is clearly considering his image. Lately, the actor has inspired more headlines about his tumultuous divorce from Angelina Jolie—spurred by a reportedly drunken domestic assault on a 2016 plane trip—than for his movies. In his most recent works (“Wolfs” and “Babylon”), Pitt has portrayed talented, weathered men whose stares down mortality could reflect the actor’s own anxiety about his position in an industry searching for younger, squeaky-clean faces to take his place. “F1” ratchets up these worries.
Instead of playing a man dutifully conceding his time, Pitt portrays Sonny Hayes, a driver whose hopes of making one last run are rekindled when he’s recruited by his former rival Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). With most of the racing season finished, Ruben’s ramshackle APXGP racing team hasn’t earned a point because their talented but conceited young driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) lacks the experience necessary to grind out wins. Even worse, their garbage cars, designed by their technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), can’t compete with the likes of Ferrari and McLaren. Ruben hopes Sonny can shape up APXGP and Joshua enough to eke out one win out of the team’s final nine races, thereby holding off squeamish investors like the smarmy Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies) from taking away Ruben’s ownership.
For “F1,” Pitt teams with “Top Gun: Maverick” director Joseph Kosinski. It’s a smart pairing for Pitt, who surely hoped Kosinski could strike the same balance he did for Tom Cruise by crafting an enthralling adventure about an aging former hotshot tasked with mentoring the next generation. Kosinski and Pitt only find a modicum of the same success. While “F1” is certainly an expertly crafted crowd pleaser, Pitt can’t match Cruise’s enviable ability to conjoin his star persona with the emotions of the movie. Instead, the rarely transportative “F1” is all cold and machinelike.
“F1” features neither the poetry of Lee H. Katzin’s “Le Mans,” nor the existentialism of Tony Scott’s “Days of Thunder,” nor the vulnerable masculinity of James Mangold’s “Ford v Ferrari.” This is a loud, muscular movie about mentorship and stardom that hews closer to “Any Given Sunday” (“Any Given Speedway”?), which has similar things to say about what makes a modern celebrity.
Kosinski’s film begins with a flickering memory of a brutal crash whose images are interrupted by the fantasy of crushing ocean waves. The recollection belongs to Sonny, who’s catching some shut-eye in his van before hopping back in his car. It’s the 24 hours of Daytona, and Sonny has the midnight shift. When he awakens, he chows down some PB&J sandwiches, dunks his face in ice water, and cranks some pull-ups before speeding through a barrage of cars set to a needle drop of “Whole Lotta Love.” This invigorating opening scene sets the stage for a movie that unfortunately never really slows down.
The film, in fact, increases its speed. We zoom through Ruben’s plea for Sonny to join his team, then watch Sonny partake in a high-stakes trial run at APXGP’s London track, and then we skip through Sonny and Joshua’s disastrous run at the Spanish Grand Prix. Don’t get me wrong, our immediate immersion in this speedy world is quite thrilling. But we can see the turns Sonny will take from a mile away, which slows our desire to fully embrace him.
Like “Any Given Sunday,” the drama in “F1” is predicated on a strained relationship shared by the older White savvy veteran (Sonny) and the Black self-absorbed talent (Joshua). As you can guess, Sonny is the total opposite of Joshua. A former phenom who blew his shot in a fiery wreck that damaged his back thirty years ago, Sonny doesn’t drive for the money. He bounces from small dirt tracks to big-time speedways with the aim of retaining an ineffable love of driving. Joshua, on the other hand, is more interested in his social engagement and follower count than winning and losing. He isn’t interested in uplifting his team. He wants to help himself by racing well enough to jump ship to a place that’ll grant him more money, exposure, and sponsorships.
An easygoing Pitt and a bewitching Idris are enough of a megawatt pairing; they smooth over the inherently bumpy dynamics of the older White hero, essentially putting his Black counterpart in his place. When Sonny challenges Joshua to forget about the outside noise in favor of the craft, you can sense Pitt both arguing for an era of stardom predating social media and for his own relevance amid a shifting Hollywood landscape. It’s a double-edged appeal that engenders sympathy from an audition that holds Pitt dear and holds Sonny back from being anything but a symbol of the old school.
Consequently, Sonny navigates the movie mostly unchallenged: he wins the unfailing support of a dysfunctional pit crew and crafts them into a fast and efficient team. Though Sonny does flirt with Kate (Condon makes a meal out of this one-dimensional character), he and the camera are surprisingly chaste.
The film is also wrestled away from Joshua If, like “Any Given Sunday,” Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger (“Top Gun: Maverick”) want “F1” to become a passing of the torch from one generation to the next. Still, this film doesn’t easily lend itself to that interpretation. Pitt isn’t ready to anoint a successor. Instead, this restless film’s ending plays like “The Defiant Ones,” wherein the Black character’s dreams are displaced in favor of his White counterpart.
The shaky aims of “F1,” however, don’t distract from the sublime excitement the racing provides. Hans Zimmer’s dynamic score, a churning and sculpted piece of music, not only matches Stephen Mirrione’s elegant editing. The music is also wonderfully juxtaposed by cinematographer Claudio Miranda’s frenetic lens. We jostle within the car and throttle around tight curves. Sometimes the sequences match “Days of Thunder” (Jerry Bruckheimer is also a producer here), particularly when Sonny angles to go high. At other points, like when APXGP buys into Sonny’s combative racing style, “F1” becomes its own snarling beast with little grounding in reality (seriously, what’s Sonny’s strategy again?) but is entertaining nonetheless.
This film doesn’t rumble through its 156-minute runtime; it flies by. And though “F1” has little to say about the sport’s past, present, or future, the propulsive ride it engineers isn’t a wasted diversion.
