Cesar (Adam Driver) and his holy T-square in Megalopolis (Courtesy of Lionsgate Films)

You must understand two things to appreciate the overblown, overindulgent glory of Francis Ford Coppola’s crackpot masterpiece Megalopolis. First, the most pie-in-the-sky fantastical architecture that Coppola can muster is apparently a waving, gelatinous, see-through, glimmering moving walkway as if Hudson Yards’ suicide shawarma, The Vessel, traded its now-fenced-in staircases for technology largely found between far-flung gates at major airports. Sure, some may argue Coppola’s shining city on a hill consists of more than that, given the montage of strange illustrations of organic architecture like a World’s Fair constructed in Midjourney. Yet, a comically emotional scene in the film, which has haunted me since watching the movie in a theater full of fellow gigglers, proves otherwise. In this scene, small-minded, anti-progress, New York—I mean, New Rome—mayor/grump Franklyn Cicero, played by Giancarlo Esposito with his salt-and-pepper hair aggressively combed forward in a rough semblance of a Caesar cut, an underappreciated visual gag inflicted on every male character, crankily refuses to join his petite wife Teresa (Kathryn Hunter, last seen as a madam in the also kooky Poor Things) on the people mover. She reaches out to him warmly as she slowly but surely glides into the distance. Finally, he steps on, joining her to heaven…or Adam Driver’s famed architect Cesar Catilina’s utopia…or Concourse A!

The second should come as no surprise given the first: Absolutely nothing in this movie makes any goddamn sense whatsoever. And doesn’t need to! In fact, Megalopolis just might be my favorite in-theater viewing experience of the year—or in recent memory—outshining even the teeth-dropping, blood-hurling, cackling gross-a-go-go The Substance. Watching Megalopolis was a snicker-fest for the majority in my nearly sold-out theater. Granted, not everyone was amused, including the boomer who bellowed a loud “BE QUIET!” during the previews and the dude in front of me who kept turning around to glare at my row of unabashed chucklers. Your loss, man. Those blessed with senses of humor as deranged as Coppola’s psychosis prevailed. An enthusiastic round of applause erupted immediately after the film’s final scene, a Roman tablet title card boasting the failed profundity of a humanist Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to our human family, and to all the species that we protect. One Earth, indivisible, with long life, education, and justice for all.” Amen, Frankie! Blessed be!

Mayor Frank Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) reaching out for the moving walkway (Courtesy of Lionsgate Films)

It’s here that I should attempt to sum up the plot—or what scraps of one I can try to shuffle together. This is a task that seems impossible, but I’ll give it a whirl: Cesar is a visionary/manic/drunk/asshole architect who pits his hopes for an idyllic city for the people of New Rome (We know it’s Roman because of the popularity of golden laurel crowns) using a mysterious substance called Megalon against Frank Cicero’s short-sighted plans for a casino. Beyond disrupting city planning meetings held precariously on a construction site by reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy with the hilarious dedication of Kenneth Branagh’s singular bleach-blonde interpretation of Shakespeare’s most emo character, Cesar can also stop time, by simply declaring “Time STOP!” No, nobody else in the film has this or any other magical capability, which he mostly uses to brood on white steel beams hung from nowhere and act on suicidal ideations without any gnarly splattered permanent consequences. At some point, Cesar also momentarily loses this power and gains it again. How? Why?! Who the fuck knows! In addition to his main antagonist Cicero, Cesar also tangles with Cicero’s free-spirit daughter Julia, played with a wooden anti-charisma by Nathalie Emmanuel. Julia is a nepo baby/party girl who becomes Cicero’s assistant, defender, and eventual lover, joining him on giant clocks overlooking the city to stare through colored light gels purposelessly.

Somewhere within this warped Roman family tree is Cesar’s mullet-plus-rat-tail-sporting, spiked-eyebrowed, sometimes-drag queen cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) who hates Cesar for a reason that seems unclear and unpersuasive to anyone other than Coppola. Out for revenge and his own ass, Clodio eventually joins forces with gold digger and Money Bunny reporter Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) in a conspiracy to usurp power and finances from her ancient, ailing hubby, Jon Voight’s richie-rich banker, Hamilton Crassus III. LaBeouf, Plaza, and Voight come off as the only three actors in the film fully aware of what a ridiculous shit show they’ve signed on for and they throw themselves into it with wild abandon accordingly, whether Plaza’s camp threats “Listen, BITCH!” or Voight’s now-classic query, “What do you think of this BONER I got?” Though the boner scene sticks in the mind like an arrow in the behind, it has nothing on Clodio and Wow’s shifty betrayer sex scene in which Clodio pleads, “I want to fuck you so bad, Auntie Wow!” while she raggedly snips off his rat tail with junk drawer scissors.

Auntie Wow (Aubrey Plaza) with her scissors and Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) (Courtesy of Lionsgate Films)

If you’re wondering where the fuck that scene came from or in what context it’s shown, don’t ask me. Mostly stuff just happens in Megalopolis. Cesar is haunted by the powdery white presence of his late wife who he was accused by Frank Cicero of murdering years earlier (He also speaks to her ghost-corpse in another scene). Wow Platinum and Crassus III hold an extravagant wedding at the Coliseum/Madison Square Garden, which includes an Asian troupe of circus performers and a vestal virgin who trills an extended song about her own purity while descending from the arena’s ceiling on a sliver moon almost exactly like Taylor Swift in the similarly disastrous Cats. After this innocent pop star is revealed to be neither 16 nor a virgin, we see her briefly rocking out in front of licking flames like Miley’s tongue-wagging gone-bad era. Clodio transforms momentarily into a populist figurehead, channeling the rage of the barely seen, downtrodden, scrubby-faced New Rome poors who mostly exist to watch these rich people make speeches. The Donald Trump metaphor here is ham-fisted, including angry plebs with red caps and “Make New Rome Great Again” signs. Subtle! Cesar visits his campily overbearing mother, played by Talia Shire, who recoils and screams when he tries to kiss her hand. He’s also shot in the face by a child Breaking Bad-style at the behest of one of Clodio’s goons (one of the only predictable scenes in the film) and is healed thanks to Megalon, which turns his face into some sort of bionic Phantom of the Opera skull mask. Oh, yeah, and an old defunct Russian satellite floats aimlessly around space like a piece of intergalactic trash, until it reminds viewers of its presence by hurtling down to New Rome, creating a Ground Zero smoking hole. And, while we’re at it, why not include a random montage about historical figures that begins with a video of Hitler, which garnered a huge laugh in my theater? Sure! Why not?! Why not also show the passing of time with a seasonal montage of dreidels, pomegranates, and Christmas trees?! Happy holidays!

That whirlwind is just a taste. I didn’t even get into the sudden shift to speaking in Latin. I mean, for fuck’s sake! So much goes on that the film, which clocks in at a sensible (shocking amongst so much that is nonsensical in this movie) two hours and eighteen minutes, downright minimalist for a late-stage passion project, feels double that length. It is also so deeply bonkers that part of me still questions whether I hallucinated it all. This is further emphasized by the sheer preponderance of psychedelic montages, mostly starring Cesar, spiraling out of control, wrestling with death post-shooting, and, perhaps most hilariously, wielding his glowing, haloed, holy T-square. Adam Driver’s unwavering, unbreakable seriousness makes all of these scenes a pure unintentionally uproarious delight, whether waving his arms like noodles in a drugged-out, drunken haze or staring into the camera while holding a beating heart. *thump thump* Did I just see that? Gloriously mystifying, the film comes off as a dreamlike product of a deliriously deteriorating mind like a cinematic version of The Caretaker.

Even this makes me laugh for some reason (Courtesy of Lionsgate Films)

Beyond witnessing Coppola’s descent into pure spitting madness, what is Megalopolis about really? Rabid and defensive Coppola-heads have created Reddit-based lists of every conceivable source that Coppola references—or more accurately, has said he references, from the quotes nestled within the stilted dialogue ripped from Marcus Aurelius and Petrarch to the less direct but no less unsubtle influence of Ayn Rand. Part of the film is also a take on the 63BC Catilinarian conspiracy in the Roman Republic, but I’m only saying this because I read it on Wikipedia. Did that conspiracy include incest? Because Coppola makes sure to announce the ick factor early by frontloading the film with a lot of cesty implications. Regardless, the only thing that remains clear is that Coppola is attempting to proclaim some Great Powerful Important Statements from above to the rest of us about creativity, humanity, progress, the future, and, of course, TIME (STOP!). While conceivably some intrepid critic could spend a whole lot of time and energy trying (and failing) to tease them out, it’s really just a bunch of half-cooked ideas, slammed together onscreen by an overheated brain.

In this, Megalopolis is inextricable from its hard-won, decades-long, chaotic production. Coppola initially came up with the film way back during yet another reportedly looney production, Apocalypse Now. With many, many fits and starts, some involving the uncomfortable similarities with 9/11 imagery, over the decades, Coppola finally embarked on creating the film in the 2020s after making bank in wines so he could drop $120 million for this bloated pet project. What is even more inspiring than blowing it all is the reported shit show on set, which included most of the visual effects and art teams either stomping off in a huff or being fired due to budgetary concerns. Various articles detail Coppola spending hours upon hours getting Cesar’s bionic eye socket right, bitching about Marvel movies then making an Art Deco green-screen bonanza that resembles both a Linkin Park music video and, ironically, the exact CGI aesthetic of Marvel flicks, and allegedly smooching actresses in the Studio 54-inspired scene (yes, with a Bianca Jagger moment that replaces the horse with a unicorn) to get them in the mood. Then, there’s this vivid account from a crew member in The Guardian:

“He would often show up in the mornings before these big sequences and because no plan had been put in place, and because he wouldn’t allow his collaborators to put a plan in place, he would often just sit in his trailer for hours on end, wouldn’t talk to anybody, was often smoking marijuana … And hours and hours would go by without anything being filmed. And the crew and the cast would all stand around and wait. And then he’d come out and whip up something that didn’t make sense, and that didn’t follow anything anybody had spoken about or anything that was on the page, and we’d all just go along with it, trying to make the best out of it. But pretty much every day, we’d just walk away shaking our heads wondering what we’d just spent the last 12 hours doing.”

Imagine FFC bursting out of his trailer in a Snoop Dogg-heavy cloud of weed smoke to announce, “I’ve got it! Colored gels!” Though Coppola has denied the hotboxing, Megalopolis is precisely the film that would be made in this manner and goes a long way to explain why the script, which has been released online, is almost completely unrecognizable from what showed up on the screen.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: Emily, this all sounds like a godawful mess—why would I want to watch that? Fair. Megalopolis IS a godawful mess. It’s a complete “wacko disaster,” to use the words of the New York Post review that drove me to watch the film. And that’s precisely why it’s good—or I wouldn’t call it good, or bad, or so good, it’s bad. Megalopolis transcends all those wimpy subjective labels to become something else entirely. It’s sublime. It’s sublime in the way two of my other favorite cinematic failures are sublime, which, despite the reading list recommended for understanding Coppola’s film, remind me more of Megalopolis than anything else: Tommy Wiseau’s The Room and the musical kitty litter box stinker Cats. The former is perhaps the most apt, especially with its bizarro dialogue performed in ways I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed on screen previously. In particular, this contemptuous scene between Cesar and Julia:

Cesar’s “YESSS….YESSS” and “go back to da cluuuuub” are the new “You’re tearing me APART, LISA!” I’m not just picking on Driver, though. Coppola sprinkles legendary actors in small parts throughout the film who exist primarily to blurt out strange lines like Dustin Hoffman’s fixer Nush Berman yelling post-meeting: “The lightening and the thunder scares the SHIT out of me!” while walking out of a room. It’s this year’s Sir Ian McKellen bellowing out a “MEOW” in Cats.

Like Tommy Wiseau, Coppola had grand ambitions that made sense to him and him alone—and dove headfirst into it, fuck everyone else. And what he produced was a sublime batshit rollercoaster ride that is baffling and amusing in equal measure, a surefire dumpster fire cult classic for an exclusive population of the psychologically unsound. Forget whatever heady gobbledygook Coppola shoved into this film, the film itself is a heroic achievement of absurdity, which, to me, says really everything necessary about creation.