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Pitt is Sonny Hayes, a one-time F1 wunderkind who has been wandering in the racing wilderness ever since a terrible crash. After helping a racing team to win 24 Hours of Daytona, carving space for a Shea Whigham appearance that is all too brief, Sonny is called to his adventure in a laundromat, a nice locational touch evincing his nomad tendencies, by Rubén Cervantes (Javier Bardem), a one-time teammate who now runs a struggling F1 team that his board is in danger of selling lest they win one of the season’s remaining races. Sonny is not just there to drive, of course, but to bump heads with his rookie teammate Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), to fall in something approximating love with team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), and to be Essentially, “F1 the Movie” is just “Talladega Nights” in reverse, with a hotshot American invading Formula One rather than the other way around, illustrated when Sonny first meets Ruben’s team, walking down the track in long shot, as if emerging from the desert. He might as well be wearing a cowboy hat. This shot made me laugh out loud which I mostly mean as a compliment.
Much of “F1: the Movie” takes place on the track, of course, and Kosinski and his production team, cinematographer Claudio Miranda, composer Hans Zimmer and the sound department create a spectacular series of racing scenes, evincing the on-track frenzy as sensory explosions of sight and sound, music and racing crew chatter and TV commentary and car sound effects all layered on top of one another, furthered in close-ups of the drivers waging all-out war against g forces just in trying to turn the wheel and this all-encompassing, stomach-dropping sensation of speed, of always being one brief moment away from losing control even as the drivers somehow almost always maintain it while navigating their way between cars. And all of it builds to one astonishing final moment that to its immense credit, is less about a narrative result than a feeling, one in which the notion of being out of control seems to loop back around and improbably meet being in complete command, like a dream where you’re running and your feet don’t touch the ground but if you were driving a car at high speed instead. It’s so good that you wish the screenplay did not underline what is transpiring with dialogue. Alas.
If the scenes on the track are sometimes spectacular, those of it are strictly painted by numbers. There is no tension in any of the interpersonal relationships because the characters are all archetypes and because the character of Sonny flouts the single most hard and fast rule: he never changes. He is virtually the same person at the end as he is at the beginning. Chris Stapleton’s song “Bad as I Used to Be” epitomizes it, but believe it or not, Sonny most evokes a Kate McKinnon line when she played Hillary Rodham Clinton back on Saturday Night Live: “flawed yet perfect.” Sonny is vincible, but also invincible, not always right, but never wrong, all brought home in his observation that when you lose, sometimes you win. When he has the winning hand in a game of cards with Joseph but declines to show them to let Joseph win instead, there are no points for exclaiming, “I knew it,” because, of course, you did; we all did; that’s Sonny Hayes. Even the eventual revelation of his perilous physical nature is mostly brushed aside, exemplifying how Sonny spends the whole movie walking between raindrops, and I could not stop wondering if Brad Pitt thinks of himself as someone who walks between raindrops too.
