Make a list of the top ten film auteurs who’d never make a superhero movie (at least in the Disney/Marvel model), and Quentin Tarantino would probably be on there. But it’s not only because of the limitations on production and content imposed by those studio behemoths. Instead, it’s because Tarantino has just created a superhero of his own, and in his newest release no less, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood.

I’m not talking about Leonardo DiCaprio here - his character’s story, that of a fading star of TV Westerns, is certainly the jumping-off point for the movie. But the key to understanding the movie isn’t DiCaprio, and it’s not even Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate, who’s also featured prominently in the film’s marketing. For me, the real cape(-less?) crusader of Tarantino’s world is Brad Pitt’s character, fictional stuntman Cliff Booth. And some of the ideas that Cliff represents might be so deeply coded that even Tarantino himself would have a hard time sorting it all out.

Granted, it’s not that useful to psychoanalyze an artist via his or her work. But it’s hard to ignore how effectively Cliff stands in (pun intended) for the ideals that Tarantino has long espoused when he talks about old-fashioned entertainment in interviews. Cliff, after all, is an example of a dying breed of behind-the-scenes workers who risked their lives to make movies happen; a role that was thoroughly changed - but hasn’t been destroyed - by Tarantino’s frequent boogeyman, digital filmmaking. 

Cliff is also a supportive friend to DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, a relationship that might mirror Tarantino’s professional relationships with frequent collaborators like Tim Roth, Michael Madsen, and many others. Pitt’s character is also shown to be (somewhat) morally upstanding, resisting a hippie girl’s sexual advances when he intuits she’s underage - a notable trait for a proxy character written by a guy who used to work with Harvey Weinstein. 

And most importantly, the ending (which I won’t spoil) of Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood confirms that somewhere inside, the filmmaker believes that his beloved analog Hollywood could have been rescued by a man of action like Cliff. While we’re encouraged to get to know Robbie’s depiction of Tate and root for her, she’s more of an icon for the period of time that Tarantino so carefully recreates here, and that he preserves in other ventures like his New Beverly Cinema in the real-life L.A.

Rick is introduced to us as a performer with a resumé not unlike the early work of Clint Eastwood: a job on a cowboy serial, with an offer to go to Italy to appear in spaghetti Westerns. Except unlike Eastwood, who made a successful transition to the lead roles in American features and later as a notable director, Rick is insecure and self-destructive. He’s terrified of moving beyond the material he knows, and resents that new directors only want to cast him as a villain-of-the-week.

Propping Rick up is Cliff, who used to be Rick’s de-facto stunt performer. Now, Cliff mostly acts as his buddy’s driver, as well as doing odd jobs around the house. Meanwhile, the new neighbours next door reveal themselves: it’s Tate and her husband, the pre-controversy version of Roman Polanski. On the periphery of the city, Tarantino also directs our attention to other newcomers, hippies who are congregating in the area. Most of them are trying to spread peace and love, though in the case of the Manson family, it’s violence and hate. 

For some, this stretch of the movie may feel excessively long. We watch the events of one day play out over what feels like 90 minutes, and all that really happens plot-wise is that Rick struggles to maintain his composure on the set of a new TV pilot, Sharon goes to a screening of her new movie, and Cliff crosses paths with some hippies who turn out to be Manson’s followers. There are probably sections of this that could be trimmed to get the runtime down by twenty-five minutes while not sacrificing too much delicious period detail. Then again, there are other viewers who will be content to stride into this breezy Californian landscape and never want to leave.

As Tate, Robbie initially seems like she’s floating on a mysterious cloud of positivity, and for anyone familiar with her character’s fate, this makes it a little extra gruesome to think about where she would end up. But as an archetype for a particular era of moviemaking and society, Tate’s innocence is more finely grained. Tate and her friends’ real-life murder coincided with the end of clean studio entertainment (at least compared to the following decade and beyond). The 70s brought a trend of grim, edgy movies - plenty of auteur cinema of the kind Tarantino celebrates elsewhere, but also the advent of mega-blockbusters of the kind he despises. No one’s saying that there’s a direct connection between the Manson murders and the souring of Tarantino’s preferred flavour of filmmaking, but the movie does end with a pronounced wistfulness about what might have been - even if it’s just the lives of the people involved.

The question the viewer has to answer is how they feel about the gender dynamics on display. Is Cliff really that heroic, given the accusations about his wife? Is the violence depicted in the closing act an example of thinly-veiled misogyny? I think I know Tarantino’s intentions on both of these points, but your mileage may vary when it comes to whether you believe him.

Superhero stories attempt to reckon with examples of phenomenal evil - poisoning the water supply, turning half of all life to dust - by pitting villains against impossibly virtuous heroes. So it’s fitting that when Tarantino makes something in this mould, the whole endeavour is grimier and down-to-earth. Cliff Booth vaults onto Rick’s roof like a superhero and even throws Bruce Lee into a car, but he also lives in a scummy trailer behind a drive-in theatre and might have killed his wife. In Tarantino’s sandbox version of Hollywood, that’s the hero the town deserves. And like any Marvel movie, it’s simple fun that may not be quite as substantial as its creators think it is.

Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood gets three and a half stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Cliff has excellent aim for a guy tripping balls on an acid-dipped cigarette.

• The sound effect used on Rick’s jump-cut conversation with James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant) made me think the 70mm projector at my screening was about to die.

• Will this movie benefit from a big haul of Oscar nominations, just because it’s about the industry?