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One of the most delicate dimensions of art is timing. The right film, painting, album, or work of architecture at the right moment can rattle cages, illuminate new horizons, instigate new thinking, and achieve immortality. Miss the mark, dither, and it’s just another disposable object. That argument underpins, at least in part, writer-director Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, finally released after he began writing it in the 1980s. It’s a movie with a lot on its mind: urbanism, empires, politics, utopia. But Coppola has been trying to make Megalopolis for so long that its window closed years ago, and it enters a culture where it feels passed by, hopelessly naive, and misaligned with the current conversation.

Courtesy Lionsgate

The film, subtitled “A Fable,” is set in some unspecified near future in New Rome, a vision of imperial New York conjured out of a “Ford to City: Drop Dead” mindset and a near-literal avatar of fall-of-republic Rome. Cracks in the edifice are everywhere. New Rome is a city treated as a city-state bearing the stress of American fissures. It’s led by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), who’s locked in existential combat over the future of the city with Cesar Catalina (Adam Driver), an urban planner/inventor/philosopher dreaming of a utopic Megalopolis. Their fight centers on a large vacant plot of land where Cesar wants to use megalon, a magic material whose discovery earned him a Nobel Prize, to build the foundations for a city of tomorrow that will cure all urban social ills. Cicero wants a casino.

We meet Cesar as he steps out of a window atop the Chrysler Building, tip-toes to the edge, and almost falls. “Time stop!” he screams, and time, literally, stops. It resumes with a snap of his fingers. The next time we see him, some minutes later, he repeats the trick as staff of his Design Authority—an agency with dominion over “parks and fares”—demolish a tenement building to make way for Megalopolis development. If it’s not clear, Cesar is a stand-in for Robert Moses, and the battles over Megalopolis are a hazy stand-in for urban renewal. When the mayor insists that the people need housing and jobs now, Cesar replies, “Don’t let the now get in the way of the forever.”

This debate ripples through the film and opens various plot avenues, like Cesar’s reprobate cousin Clodio (Shia LaBeouf) using the Megalopolis fight to foment a political movement led by New Rome’s unemployed, homeless, and put-upon have-nots. (Spoiler alert: It goes full MAGA—with all the subtlety of a trash can tossed through a Capitol window—almost immediately.) Coppola sets this conflict within a world of degenerate indulgence and grinding inequity. The city really earns its name. Madison Square Garden is the Coliseum, complete with chariot races and a Circus Maximus. Dance clubs are anything goes bacchanales. Everyone wealthy dresses in a gaudy, neo-ancient Roman style. But this is all an old man’s idea of decadence. (Coppola is 85.) Or, at least, one that’s stuck in a Me Decade/greed-is-good mentality. One club scene looks like it was directly inspired by Studio 54; the Coliseum looks like a critique of themed dinner theater chain rest Medieval Times; everyone works in finance. There’s no lack of contemporary examples of gratuitous material excess that could have informed these sequences and design decisions. Coppola let the past get in the way of the now.

Writer/director Francis Ford Coppola on the set of Megalopolis with Adam Driver. Photo by Phil Caruso, courtesy Lionsgate

Megalopolis works best when it’s experimental, like when a broken Soviet satellite smashes into New Rome and shadows of interpretive dancers are cast on red-hued skyscrapers. It also works when it’s outré: Aubrey Plaza steals every scene she’s in as an over-the-top gold-digging TV reporter, Wow Platinum, who seems plucked from a different, wilder, more fun film. But too often Megalopolis is disappointingly out of step with where America is today. For one, Robert Moses and urban renewal mattered more 40 years ago; there are new power brokers and gentrification battles worthy of confrontation today. And while Cesar’s urban dreams seem fantastical and fantastic—the designs for Megalopolis feel like Santiago Calatrava and Bjarke Ingels collaborated on a biomechanical city inspired by Superstudio—it feels self-indulgent, especially when he waxes philosophical and Shakespearean as people starve and riot. That he does eventually build a first slice of Megalopolis feels more about proving the necessity of not letting go of the dream than whatever its practical outcomes. How does the dream coexist with the nightmare of reality? Megalopolis conveniently ends before confronting this question, if it even knows the question exists.

A lot of the film is too convenient, to its detriment. More risks, more Wow Platinums, and Megalopolis is destined for misunderstood cult masterpiece status. But it’s too literal, too enamored with itself, too disjointed. Coppola wants people to come out thinking about what’s possible, to discuss the world around them and debate what can be. The unfortunate reality is that most viewers are going to ask only one question: “Why did I just watch that?”