The Fall Guy Is What We Mean When We Say “Movies Are Back”

Courtesy of Universal Pictures

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When, in praising a movie like The Fall Guy, we say “movies are back,” we say it knowing that movies never went anywhere. In this world there are two fundamental truths: It’s so over and we’re so back. And these truths are true not on an alternating basis but simultaneously. At any given moment, it has never been more over and we have never been so back. And this is true of movies like it’s true of everything else. So when a recent first-time director said, in a GQ Hype profile from the other week, that movies are over, he was not wrong. But they’re also back.

And when we walk out of a Love Lies Bleeding or a Challengers ready to shout “Movies are back” from the metaphorical/social-media rooftops, what we generally mean is that movie stars are back. Movie stars never went anywhere either, obviously, but for a while movie-business people seemed to be determined to convince us that they didn’t matter—that actors were dispensable and the future of the medium would be hired-gun directors jingling various intellectual-property key rings in front of our faces forever.

“Part of the Marvel-ization of Hollywood,” Quentin Tarantino suggested on a podcast a few years back, “is…you have all these actors who have become famous playing these characters. But they’re not movie stars. Right? Captain America is the star. Or Thor is the star.”

We are maybe ready again for movies in which stars are the star. Culturally as well as fiscally, the biggest movie of this past weekend was Challengers, a movie about adults played by bona fide movie star Zendaya and burgeoning movie stars Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist making out in various configurations. When we say We come to this place for magic—riffing on a movie-theater chain ad that became a cultural touchstone in part because it, too, leveraged an actual movie star’s otherworldly charisma—this is what we’re talking about. Movies with sex and stakes and sports montages cued to run-through-a-wall music by dudes from Nine Inch Nails.

The Fall Guy opens today. Technically it’s another attempt to dust off a piece of old IP—the 1980s TV series starring Lee Majors as a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter—and inflate it into a blockbuster. On paper, it’s the kind of thing we’re all tired of. In practice, it’s the most non-tennis-threesome-based fun you’ll have at the movies this weekend. But—with all due respect to The Fall Guy’s director David Leitch, its screenwriter Drew Pearce, and a charismatic cast led by Emily Blunt, Winston Duke and Hannah Waddingham—this would most likely not be the case if a different person had played Colt Seavers, the titular Guy. The Fall Guy works because Ryan Gosling plays Colt Seavers, and Ryan Gosling is a movie star—not to mention one of the most charming motherfuckers ever to draw breath.

Anyone who didn’t already know Gosling was funny figured it out after Barbie, for which he deserved some kind of honorary Oscar for achievement in the field of Really Going For It. But the thing about Gosling’s performance in Greta Gerwig’s film is that playing the oblivious Ken required him to bury his self-awareness, his grasp of the inherently ridiculous nature of acting itself, the way he can be simultaneously present in a scene and almost winking out at us like Hey, it’s me, Ryan, and I know as well as you do that this is fake. Hosting Saturday Night Live two weeks ago he was inches away from breaking pretty much the whole time, and in turn you could see the cast trying not to catch the giggles from him. Gosling’s banter with Blunt in Fall Guy feels like that, too, like they both cracked up after every cut (which in turn makes them seem more like people who are hot for each other—funny how that works).

It’s like the critic David Thomson once wrote about Cary Grant once: “He is too sensible to suppose that good audiences (and he does require the best in us) could believe in the illusion. He thinks we’re worthy of seeing the story and its intricate process of being told. Just as in a good joke, we observe the pleasure of the person telling the story.” There are other good reasons to see Fall Guy—it’s a perfect rallying cry for post-strike Hollywood, an uptempo romp about skilled professionals doing their jobs. (For more on this angle, read Jesse Hassenger’s Fall Guy take here.) But it’s Gosling’s knowing, jovial presence I’ll remember. Not just him carrying the movie, but the lightness with which he carries it. That’s movie stardom. Movies are over. Movies are back.

Originally Appeared on GQ