Fans of Wes Anderson will love 'Asteroid City,' which doubles down on ... everything

Are the films of any contemporary director as instantly recognizable as Wes Anderson’s?

Maybe Quentin Tarantino’s blood-soaked frames? Terrance Malick’s meditative landscapes? Christopher Nolan’s massive, effects-free set pieces?

Nah.

Anderson’s hyper-stylized films — not just the look, but the dialogue, the plots, the performances and everything else about them — are uniquely his own. (Filtering stills from other movies to make them look like Anderson’s was a recent social media obsession.)

“Asteroid City” is the latest of these intricate shadow-box picture frames come to life. It’s everything Anderson, only more so. That’s a good thing, at least to those of us who admire his work, his whimsical style and his lightly hidden themes of longing and despair.

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What is 'Asteroid City' about?

The cast is ridiculous: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Bryan Cranston, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Jeffery Wright, Edward Norton, Steve Carell, Margot Robbie — the list goes on and on. Each buys in on the Anderson ethic, modulating their performances so that the deadpan delivery is uniform. It’s either infections or off-putting, depending.

I really liked it.

There’s a framing device in which Cranston appears, in black-and-white scenes, as a Rod Serling-like narrator introducing an unproduced play by the famous playwright Conrad Earp that is being filmed for a TV special (it’s set in the 1950s). Earp says a few words of introduction and then the screen fills with color — oversaturated color, a vision of a kind of imaginary West, as we follow a train whose cargo includes, among avocado and pecans, a nuclear warhead.

Soon we’re in Asteroid City, a tiny little spot in the middle of the desert. There’s a diner, a gas station, a motel and a highway ramp to nowhere, which is probably a metaphor of some sort, as is probably everything else.

There’s also a meteor crater, from 3007 B.C., and an observatory.

The town is the home of the annual Junior Stargazers and Space Cadets convention. That’s what brings photographer Augie Steenbeck (Schwartzman) to town, along with his young daughters who believe they are witches, and his son Woodrow (Jake Ryan), who will collect a prize he’s won. Of course, Augie is actually an actor playing Augie; the facade drops occasionally when, being the high-maintenance sort, he needs motivation and such.

Augie has not yet gotten around to telling the kids that their mother died a couple of weeks earlier. His father-in-law Stanley (Hanks), pistol permanently tucked into his waistband, makes the trek; he has no use for Augie.

A famous movie star, Midge Campbell (Johansson) also arrives with her daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards), also there for the convention. There is a group of singing cowboys and a teacher and her class, among other people, gathered for the weekend.

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The cast is insane: Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson and more

But the most notable visitor is an alien from outer space, who arrives in a space ship to retrieve something. This results in a government-mandated lockdown, and a lot of extra time spent together by the people gathered in Asteroid City.

It unfolds in ways both comic and affecting. Augie and Midge flirt from the windows of their little cabins across from each other, starting with him running lines with her. Woodrow (known as “Brainiac”) and Dinah flirt in a more straightforward manner.

It’s at once a simple nod to ’50s sci-fi and a more complex exploration of … what? Humanity? Relationships? The inevitability of time marching on?

Almost, or maybe kind of. The film is doing a lot of work, actually. The bouncing back and forth from Cranston and the stage and the “show” (actually the film) doesn’t take the audience out of the moment. Instead it does something else: Shows us the frustrations and triumphs of creating art, and what that art looks like once it’s created.

'Asteroid City' 4.5 stars

Great ★★★★★ Good ★★★★

Fair ★★★ Bad ★★ Bomb ★

Director: Wes Anderson.

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks.

Rating: PG-13 for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material.

How to watch: In theaters Friday, June 23.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: 'Asteroid City' review: This is the Wes Anderson we know and love