The new film from Wes Anderson, Asteroid City, is a play within a teleplay within a movie. Some of the action of the film, which premiered here at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, is a mid-century television special about the making of a stage show by a Thornton Wilder-esque writer played with foppish melancholy by Edward Norton. The play, Asteroid City, is brought to vibrant life for us in the audience—though not, necessarily, for the imagined audience of the fictional broadcast.

If that sounds confusing, well, it is. One could spend a fair amount of time scratching one’s head wondering what Anderson is up to with all of this layering. Or one could, as I did, simply give into the meta-textual conceit, relishing in the wistful mood so beautifully, delicately conjured up by America’s foremost purveyor of whimsy. Anderson’s high style has grown alienating over the last decade or so; he’s made some exhausting films, fussy and overly formal objets d’art that don’t seem to be saying much of anything. Asteroid City is a return to a balance of old: its mannered affect is evened out by a persuasive emotional undercurrent, a whispery poignancy that suggests the film actually means something.

What is that meaning, exactly? I suspect that the global experience of the past few years has something to do with it. In Asteroid City, a group of strangers descend on the titular Southwestern desert town for a convention of gifted young science students. Parents and kids commingle in typically Andersonian, presentational fashion, in yet another of his diorama-box sets. They’re soon stuck there, under a particular kind of quarantine. (That dreaded word!)

But the characters of Asteroid City don’t seem trapped in their confines. There is a heady sense of outside-ness to the film, pink sunset skies and dappled light. Several scenes are set under the gentle shadows of a latticed pergola, a beguiling effect. Purply dusk provides apt framing for a discussion of death. Cute and backdrop-y as the film’s aesthetic may be, Asteroid City does still feel a part of our world.

Which, of course, it isn’t. We’re meant to be watching a play of some kind; the whole thing is built as artifice. Yet the film is alert and alive instead of static, like too many other recent Anderson creations. A sadness breezes around the film’s characters as they consider lost pasts, lost people, and the hazy vistas of the future. Anderson suggests the busyness of existence even when things are so in stasis, a heartening (if vague) evocation of how things kept puttering along (for us fortunate ones, anyway) even in the nervous cramp of darkest 2020. 

Jason Schwartzman plays a recent widower, a hardened war photographer nonetheless struggling to process the recent death of his wife. Schwartzman also plays the actor playing the photographer, in a single arresting scene that adds some welcome queerness to the Anderson mix. Scarlett Johansson plays an actor in something of the Marilyn Monroe mold, though she’s a dryer, more pragmatic sort. She and Schwartzman have peppery chemistry in their scenes together, romantic-ish interludes that may be Anderson’s approximation of stifled, but still vital, Zoom-window connection. 

They are but two of the big names who populate Anderson’s film. Elsewhere there’s Tom Hanks, Hope Davis, Jeffery Wright, Hong Chau, Tilda Swinton, Liev Schreiber, Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, and more. Though the ensemble is vast, somehow Anderson gives each performer their due. In aggregate, the small stories that make up the film—both in Asteroid City and in the stage production that’s housing it—present a mural of everyday humanity, all its quiet passion and accidental humor.

There is, to use tired modern parlance, a pleasant vibe to the film. It’s as if Anderson is turning his mind back on, switch by switch, after the cataclysms of the past few years. Suddenly his old pretensions feel welcome again; here, born anew, is the purpose of his particular (and occasionally vexing) style. It’s an oddly moving film, this bright and quite literally stagey curio involving an extraterrestrial. At its best, Asteroid City evokes the memory of what it was to first see a Wes Anderson film, surprised and delighted by its singular vision of life on Earth.