F1 ® The Movie (2025 | USA | 156 minutes | Joseph Kosinski)
Joseph Kosinski continues to establish himself as the cinematic poet laureate of aging men and fast metal. Like Maverick before it, F1 ® The Movie sees a past-his-prime speed demon called back into service for one last shot to live out his dreams and save a massive enterprise with hard-won wisdom and talent. Both films might be better interpreted as death reveries, but damn if it isn’t incredibly fun to coast alongside their heroes in the perpetual golden hour of wish fulfillment.
In this case, the hero is Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), who, as the film opens, is apparently living in a van down by the racetrack. We meet him as he’s roused from slumber to take a shift in the 24 Hours of Daytona race. He goes through a routine of lucky habits — a cold plunge in ice water, pulling on mismatched socks, and some business involving playing cards that suggests that he might be competing for the role of Gambit when the X-Men make their MCU debut. The sequence communicates that he’s old but crafty; his game involves playing little bits of intel to his advantage to put his team ahead. But he’s also a superstitious drifter who collects a check and hits the road rather than basking in any victory celebrations.
Soon enough, old friend and former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem; we see what you did there) crashes into Sonny’s vagabond lifestyle of roadside laundromats, truck stop showers, and folksy diners. He presents a ticket and an impossible offer: a coveted seat in F1 to turn the tides for a winless team with a shitbox car and a hotshot young driver yet to reach his potential. With just nine races left in the season, he reasons that an aging veteran in search of redemption might be just what it takes to turn his fortunes around before the team’s greedy board cashes in by selling the operation out from under him.
In real life, Brad Pitt has recently passed his sixtieth birthday. In a sport increasingly dominated by kids just out of high school, this is quite obviously preposterous, but this is the movies, so of course he accepts, and we are quite literally off to the races as he fits himself into a racing jumpsuit and dons a helmet that accentuates the lines that have accumulated around his eyes. Because his hasty re-entry into the hyper-competitive landscape is suitably bumpy, it allows us to shrug off the absurdity of it and enjoy the fantasy.
I’m only the most casual fan of Formula One (in that I’ve watched every season of Netflix’s addictive documentary series Drive to Survive), but for my money, F1 The Movie has everything anyone could ever want from an auto racing movie. It has big stars giving big performances. Not only do the fast cars go very fast, you can feel the speed in every frame, making the action feel both thrilling and the stakes scream with real danger.
Sensational globetrotting footage captures crown jewels of the Formula One circuit like Silverstone in the UK, Monza in Italy, Spa in Belgium, Zandvoort in the Netherlands, the Las Vegas Strip in the US, and the Yas Marina Circuit in Abu Dhabi. Each of these stops is packed with cameos from the biggest names in F1 racing — even the often elusive Max Verstappen makes appearances alongside two dozen real drivers like Charles Leclerc, George Russell, Lando Norris, and Daniel Ricciardo. We also see principals from the most successful teams like Christian Horner (Red Bull), Toto Wolff (Mercedes), and Zak Brown (McLaren) who’ll be very familiar to Drive to Survive and Formula One fans alike. Most importantly, along with appearing in the film, seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton is also among the film’s producers, explaining in part the breathtaking level of access that allowed this film to exist (and likely motivated its subplot about a young Black driver trying to make a name for himself). Watching it play out among these actual drivers and courses contributes to an intensely thrilling sense of hyperreality.
There’s a bit of backstory threaded throughout to convince us that Sonny’s not entirely out of his depth, but it doesn’t drag. Instead, the character is gradually built from superstitious pre-race tics, glimpses of tattoos and gnarly scars while descending into ice baths. Details of his past are communicated through smatterings of faux archival clips, magazine covers featuring pictures of Young Brad looking a different kind of dreamy, and conversational fill-ins over the first couple of acts. Occasional commentary from real F1 reporters like Drive To Survive’s Will Buxton and this movie’s version of a Ted Lasso-ian Trent Crimm to interrogate him about his torrid history of gambling, divorces, and decades bouncing around the circuit after an early flame-out.
It’s a film that succeeds entirely on Pitt and the stunning race footage. Whether it’s laziness in screenwriting or a lack of faith in the audience, the plot is highly schematic, and the characters disappointingly one-dimensional. In the case of someone with the screen presence of Javier Bardem, it works. He drops in and out of the story, delivering one-liners like “It’s not the car, it’s the driver” and has the ability to make the slick team owner character work. Less fortunate is newcomer Damson Idris, who plays the team’s young driver, Joshua Pearce. The role is deeply underdeveloped — he’s a blingy hothead who’s required to hate his old man rival and do stupid young guy things to assert his dominance. But he does have a good relationship with his mom (Sarah Niles, likely most familiar as the psychologist on Ted Lasso), who assures her son that Pitt’s Sonny looks damn fine for his age. As F1’s first female technical director, Kerry Condon, fares slightly better. She’s given a little more room to establish herself as a groundbreaking figure, if only so that she can go toe-to-toe with Sonny, leverage her ambitions to build him a vehicle worthy of combat, play peacemaker between warring drivers, and kindle a little romantic spark.
Unsurprisingly, the plot is pretty shabby, but it does exactly what it needs to do to keep the film humming along like a well-oiled, exceptionally engineered speed demon that’s been optimized for the single purpose of entertaining mass audiences. Pitt’s warm charisma is more than enough to fill the void, so we cheer as the past-his-prime driver oversteps his bounds to compensate for the team’s lack of success by asserting control, calling his own shots, and shifting race strategy to his will on the fly. He’s got an old man’s work ethic, getting up every raceday to run the course on foot, working out with tennis balls, spending hours in the simulator, and running his own strength and conditioning program. As he wins over skeptics, it makes sense because this version of Brad Pitt could make anyone believe in anything. A morning jog is a very easy sell when he’s leading it.
Watching, I kept thinking that Tom Cruise must be so angry that Kosinski made this movie in which the actors drove real race cars on real race tracks and were captured doing it with innovative camera technology without him, but this speaks to how suited Pitt is to the role. Cruise is all cold messianic determination and an armor of flawlessness. This role requires someone willing to be ever so slightly shaggier to pull it off. Pitt’s looseness and willingness to convey warmth and the challenges of a well-aged body alongside a no fucks left to give confidence is essential. I also think that Cruise might have actually died in pursuit of absolute authenticity. He’d have demanded being in the actual races, and not just on the same tracks.
Even if all the races weren’t filmed at full speed, it looks phenomenal from start to finish, and most importantly the auto racing is gripping. Every little plot point is clearly set up and satisfyingly paid off. It makes room for little side plots about a clumsy mechanic who makes good, gets us invested in the timing and speed of pit stops, and strategizing about the hardness of racing tires. Kosinski once again teams up with ace cinematographer Claudio Miranda; they’ve thrived in frequent collaborations on bringing action to the screen in glorious fashion. His work may also be familiar from shooting Ang Lee’s groundbreaking adaptation of Life of Pi or the more recent dive into the waters of endurance swimming for Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, Jimmy Chin’s Nyad. All the footage at and surrounding the tracks is so handsomely mounted and captivatingly filmed that even the corniest plot points — like the cardboard rivalries between drivers — never feel cheap.
For most of the two and a half-hour stretch, the film is all gas, no brakes. Even when the it briefly slows down for a brief romantic interlude to allow Pitt gazes wistfully over the Las Vegas Strip while making a clichéd monologue sound profound, this explanation of a driver’s quest for transcendence is part and parcel of setting up the final stretch. Some might groan as the film feels the need to cycle through introducing yet another villain, yet another unlikely comeback, yet another improbable race. As much as the script could’ve been tidied up, the financial stakes made more clear, it’s also very hard for me to be angry when the third act finds Tobias Menzies absolutely cooking in his limited screen time to give us an instantly loathsome comedic dilettante villain to root against.
Whether real F1 fans will hoot in delight or groan in agony over some of the plot twists is something that I can’t predict. Like Formula One, it is plastered with ads (I wasn’t even a little bit surprised to learn that Expensify is a real company) and is itself an ad to attract new fans to auto racing. To me, aware of the sport via reality/documentary television, many of the details feel like the writers and consultants had a ball gaming out an array of potential loopholes to be exploited. From nuances of tire hardness, rules around safety cars, importance of race positions, and technicalities of warm-up laps, it’s like a fantasy of every little trick in the complicated rulebook being played. Most entertainingly, the film also indulges in the speculative exercise of indulging the fantasy of what would happen if drivers on the same team actually worked together to win rather than constantly undermining each other to serve their egos.
There’s a lot of detail for the gearheads, but it never gets overwhelming thanks to the constant chatter and slickly realized graphics that keep viewers perpetually informed as to stakes and strategy. Throughout, the races look both exciting and dangerous, with tons of tight corners, high-speed competition for position, and some absolutely terrifying crashes, many of which feel ripped from the headlines. With Lewis Hamilton as a producer, one can only marvel at the mechanics of how this film was made alongside an actual season of Formula One. I’m already dreaming that there will be a behind-the-scenes documentary (or, more likely, special feature on AppleTV+) about intricacies of production. The filmmaking from inside and outside the cockpit as sparks fly and fireworks explode is absolutely astonishing stuff. In part, because the action feels so real, it’s easy to be swept up in it, letting the full-frame IMAX images cast aside any objections to the perpetually preposterous scenarios. In a very loud movie that makes theatrical viewing essential, Kosinski is also smart enough to know when to shut up, quiet all the noise, and let Hans Zimmer’s contemplative rumbling score take the wheel. It leads to some truly magnificent moments.
This is easily Apple’s most successful film, and it’s clear why they’ve given it such a bright spotlight and multi-quadrant roll-out in partnership with WB. It’s glorious to look at and is so much fun to see with an audience who cheer along and catch all the Easter eggs. They’ve won an Oscar with CODA and established even more prestige with Killers of the Flower Moon. F1 the Movie might just be the flagship film that breaks through to mass audiences and box office success. I can only hope that their eagerness for subscribers doesn’t find them cutting short a theatrical run that deserves to be seen in IMAX for as long as possible. It’s far from a perfect movie, but as far as summer blockbusters go, it had all the big dumb fun necessary to leave me walking out with a giddy smile. I can’t wait to see it again on a big screen before it gets forever garaged inside the little black box that’s parked next to my television set.
F1 ® The Movie arrives in theaters on June 27
Photo Credit: Photo by Scott Garfield Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures / Apple Original Films