Asteroid City review: Not everyone loves Wes Anderson’s style but his latest offering is both beautiful and meaningful

Neither of them have appeared in an Anderson film before, but slot right into the mannered world of Asteroid City, a movie that in many respects ticks all the familiar Wes boxes: stop-motion, scale models, literary flourishes, a huge ensemble cast. But Wes Anderson films are not about nothing, and nor is Asteroid City: beneath its pristine, minutely tended surface lie big ideas about storytelling, America, postwar paranoia.

The city of the title is not a city at all; it’s a one-horse town in the New Mexican deserts, named after an asteroid that landed there 5,000 years ago. And in fact, Asteroid City is not real at all, but the setting for a play by legendary writer Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), whom we see clattering away at his typewriter and choosing the play’s leading actor, Jones Hall (Jason Schwartzman). A cheesy 1950s TV host (Bryan Cranston) then introduces us into Earp’s imaginary world.

Jones Hall is Augie Steenbeck, a pipe-smoking war photographer who arrives in Asteroid City in September 1955 with his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three small but witchy daughters. Woodrow is a science wonk, and has come to take part in an astronomy convention, but Augie has not yet found the courage to tell his kids that their mother died three weeks ago.

He is distracted from this task by the arrival in town of Hollywood beauty Midge Campbell (Ms Johansson), who takes an interest in Augie’s photography and flirts with him through the open windows of their neighbouring motel bungalows. But trouble is on the horizon, firstly in the spiffy shape of the photographer’s father-in-law Stanley Zak (Mr Hanks), who dresses like a golf pro and makes it clear that he never approved of Augie.

Then, this being a Wes Anderson film, an extraterrestrial intervention in the astronomy convention prompts host General Grif Gibson (Jeffrey Wright) to mount a military quarantine, trapping all and sundry in Asteroid City. Still, at least they have vending machines that dispense martinis and real estate plots to amuse them.

And what a collection these stranded convention-goers are: Rupert Friend, Maya Hawke, Steve Carell, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Rita Wilson, Hope Davis, Matt Dillon and Jarvis Cocker for God’s sake are among the townsfolk and the stranded, while Willem Dafoe, Margot Robbie and Jeff Goldblum appear in the real world of 1950s American theatre beyond.

The first thing to say about Asteroid City is that it looks absolutely gorgeous. Anderson starts in the crisp black and white of TV shows like The Twilight Zone, then unleashes his fantasy frontier town in a blaze of pastel colours, tastefully arranged and bleached out like a John Hinde postcard of the Sahara.

Anderson’s diners and sunsets are straight out of Edward Hopper, his framing full of references to cherished films of the period: the chugging train that first takes us into Asteroid City is a reference to the Spencer Tracy movie Bad Day at Blackrock, released in 1955. And an Actors’ Studio-style session summons the chiselled ghost of James Dean, who died (of course) in September, 1955.

These references might sound fussy, but need not detain the uninterested. Anderson’s films are sometimes arid, but Asteroid City is not. Because even though we know their world is an artifice, we’re drawn time and again into the story of Augie and Mitch, who use humour and cynicism to hide their pain. In the end, our love of stories, and our deep need for them, trumps all logic.

Asteroid City is in cinemas from June 23, 2023

Rating: Four stars