Is a Perfect Brad Pitt Vehicle

Time​ Magazine

17-06-2025

There's a sturdy formula at work in Joseph Kosinki's hugely entertaining F1 The Movie, and it has nothing to do with the intricate Formula One racing regulations. The idea of the aging athlete, thief, or cowboy who has one last fill-in-the-blank left in him is at least as old as Sam Peckinpah's magnificently bloody—and deeply moving—1969 western The Wild Bunch, and probably older. You can argue that there's a double standard at work here: aging actresses usually get the far less glamorous, and far less proactive, fading starlet roles. Even so, there's something touching about a storyline that involves an aging guy making one final, desperate grab for that big bank job, that high-stakes bounty, that shiny, emblematic trophy. Their egos are just as big as ever, but their bodies are failing them in ways they never could have imagined at age 20. These types of roles are great consolation prizes for male actors as they age out of straightforward leading-man roles; sometimes they represent an actor's best work.
To paraphrase an old and outlandishly sexist women's hair-color advertising slogan, Brad Pitt isn't getting older; he's getting better. In F1, he plays a scruffy, aging driver who trundles from town to town in a van kitted out with life's essentials—a bunk, a small bookcase, a pull-up bar—answering the call whenever anyone needs some random Joe to man a fast car. This is no way to make a living. As we watch him prepare for the movie's first race, a small-town affair where his takeaway amounts to just $5,000, he's a crazy wildflower bouquet of jangled nerves: he does a few desperate last-minute pull-ups, dunks his face in a tiny basin of ice water, and superstitiously slips a playing card into the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then he jumps into a car's cockpit, and wins. Pitt's character is Sonny Hayes, a perfect movie name for an almost-has-been if ever there were one. He takes his tiny check and drives off into the sunset—or, rather, to the laundromat, where an old friend and colleague, Javier Bardem's Ruben Cervantes, locates him after having searched for him for ages. Ruben tries to tempt Sonny into one last…well, you know.
It turns out that Sonny was a racing phenomenon of the '90s, a surefire champion, before flaming out in a crash that nearly killed him. In the years since, he's just been a cool—yet stressed-out—guy tootling around anonymously from race to race. Sonny's old racing teammate Ruben is now the owner of a failing F1 racing team, APXGP—Apex for short—and though Sonny at first resists his friend's entreaties, he eventually succumbs, showing up for training in London wearing a rumpled shirt, with uncombed hair and a bag slung over his shoulder. In other words, he's cooler than anyone—even if, under the surface, he's also intensely stressed out. His future teammate, the rarin'-to-go hotshot Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), is unimpressed by gramps. He later tells his mother this new guy he's being forced to work with is 'really old, like 80.'
These two are quite obviously going to clash, perhaps too many times. Kosinski recently directed another older-guy-gets-a-second-chance movie, 2022's Top Gun: Maverick, and the script he's working from here—which he cowrote with Ehren Kruger—keeps oldster Sonny and young punk Joshua sparring maybe a little too long. But all the intergenerational drama is really just an excuse for lots of fabulous driving. As an individual who has not been behind the wheel of a car since passing my driver's test in 1986, I somehow adore racing movies. At one point during F1, as I watched Sonny navigate the twists and turns of a track the way a violinist sails through a tricky movement, I scrawled in my notebook, 'It must feel like flying.' The metaphor is so stupidly obvious that it eventually becomes an F1 plot point, but no matter. The F1 Grands Prix races take place in glamorous locales around the world—Abu Dhabi, Monza, Las Vegas—and the organization allowed Kosinski and his cast and crew to film during the actual events, though only during downtime. That's part of what makes F1 feel so vital, and so fun. Idris and Pitt do their own driving as well, hitting speeds of up to 180 m.p.h. (Pro drivers can go as fast as 220 m.p.h.) If they make race-car driving look incredibly cool and awesome, they also capture how emotionally stressful it must be. The crashes depicted in the movie are unnervingly realistic, multisensory symphonies of screeching tires and seemingly unquenchable flames. No wonder Pitt's Sonny has so many superstitious rituals.
F1 is a Jerry Bruckheimer production, with all the attendant glossy, noisy earmarks. (Though Bruckheimer is best known for producing action films like Con Air, Armageddon, and both Top Gun movies, it's worth noting that his oeuvre also includes pictures like Paul Schrader's Cat People, the political drama Veronica Guerin, and the soap-opera spoof Young Doctors in Love.) It also benefits from the involvement of people who know what they're doing: F1 racing champ Lewis Hamilton was an adviser and producer, and he also makes a cameo. There's also a fine array of actors here: Idris makes a fine cocky young upstart. As the first F1 woman tech director (sadly fictional), Kerry Condon is spikily charming. (She rides a bike to work—the team's training HQ is in the English countryside—explaining, 'My job is wind, so it helps to feel it.')
But really, Pitt is the guy. His face has weatherbeaten savoir-faire; it's a map of mistakes and regrets. F1 also does not skimp on the mystique of racers' gear-and-stuff: the flameproof zip-up jumpsuits, the soft, flat-soled driving booties, the giant helmets that make their bodies look tiny, wiry, and sexy in comparison, Daft Punk-style. Racecar driving is alluring and glamorous, but Pitt's Sonny shows us another side, too: how a dream can come close to sapping the life out of you. You really need him to win that one last race. How many times have we seen this storytelling convention, and why don't we get sick of it? It all boils down to the actor, and how good he is at vibing with universal aging-guy feelings, including the realization that your grandest achievements may be behind you. Brad Pitt, at 61, has finally aged into roles like these. And sometimes, as F1 proves, they're the best thing that can happen to a guy.