Make no mistake, Megalopolis is a mess. 

Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, and perhaps, last feature is overblown, grandiose, and barely holds together, the storytelling confused with plot points dropped and characters disappearing. 

For all that, this work of an 85-year-old auteur is also a film of stunning ambition as a lion in winter roars at the dying light. Gorgeous to behold with eyepopping production design and cinematography and a top-flight cast, forgive it its excesses and just surrender to the spectacle. 

One suspects that Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), the Robert Moses-like figure who has utopian dreams of remaking the titular Megalopolis—a struggling city, part ancient Rome, part down-and-dirty-’70s era Manhattan—is a stand-in for Coppola himself. Certainly, his dreams are as flamboyant as the director’s and as Coppola has struggled for decades with studio suits so Cesar grapples with opposition from corrupt Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) and powerful banker Hamilton Crassus III (Jon Voight).  

For everyone but Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), who is in thrall to his mad, arrogant genius, Cesar is a troublesome enigma. And, truly, no one has reason to trust him. To Cicero and Crassus, he represents unwanted change that might undermine their dirty business. Yet, the people whose lives Cesar insists he seeks to improve have even less reason to put their faith in him: In order to build his utopia, he razes apartment blocks, leaving people homeless. 

Cesar obsesses over the future in a movie rooted in the past. His own offices are in the Chrysler Building, and the film acts as a valentine to its Art Deco magnificence. In a movie that casts itself as an operatic ancient Roman fable with a nod to Shakespeare, Madison Square Garden plays the Coliseum in the Megalopolis’ most arresting sequence, “Bread and Circuses,” as intrigue unfolds against the backdrop of chariot races. 

Coppola’s longtime cinematographer Mihai Malaimare Jr. (Tetro, Twixt) lens work and Beth Mickle and Bradley Rubin’s vivid production design evocatively capture Coppola’s vision. The large cast that includes Laurence Fishburne, Dustin Hoffman, Coppola’s sister Talia Shire, D.B. Sweeney, and James Remar is excellent, although some actors appear to be in an entirely different movie. In particular, Coppola’s nephew Jason Schwartzman as Cicero aide Jason Zanderz, Aubrey Plaza as Crassus’ bride and Cesar’s former lover Wow Platinum, and Shia LaBeouf as Crassus’ duplicitous and gleefully psychotic nephew Clodio Pulcher are live wires among their mostly sober costars. This isn’t a flaw. They are fun to watch. 

Cesar has one peculiar talent: He can stop time. Manipulating time, of course, is a filmmaker’s trick: Coppola can freeze a frame, skip forward and back between past and future, compress decades into mere hours. No such luck in real life and he seems only too aware of that. It’s been 61 years since the director made his feature debut, Dementia 13, and Megalopolis feels like the summing up of all those decades since, the triumphs and the failures as well as the middling features that helped a man who likes to live large pay the bills. It’s big. It’s chaotic. If this is his swan song, it’s epic. —Pam Grady