Even some of Wes Anderson’s most die-hard fans were put off by his 2021 film The French Dispatch, with its three-story structure and stilted, self-conscious evocation of literary France. Anderson hasn’t changed his storytelling technique in the slightest for his new film Asteroid City, but his recent detractors will be relieved nonetheless: this is his most enrapturing feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel nearly a decade ago.
As in many of Anderson’s films, the plot comes with multiple framing devices. We first see Bryan Cranston in black and white as an Edward R Murrow-esque TV host who introduces us to an earnest playwright called Conrad Earp (Edward Norton), who is working on the story we are about to watch. Asteroid City, then, is a film within a play within a TV show, or something like that. It is, we are told early on, an “apocryphal fabrication” – and it even has an optional intermission.
