F1
Cinemark
4012 Walnut St.
Philadelphia
Seen July 7, 2025
It’s a 90-degree July Fourth weekend. The Philly trash strike is heating up. You go to the neighborhood Cinemark to catch some primo air conditioning and a summer blockbuster. The coolest guy you can imagine is on screen: It’s 61-year-old alleged domestic abuser Brad Pitt!
Pitt is experiencing the most successful box-office opening of his career right now with the premiere of F1, a Hollywood hyperdrive drama about the highest class of international auto racing. The film’s release represents the growing popularity of the European-based Formula 1 sport among American audiences. That said, the movie’s apparent mission is not to promote the sport, but to posit that Pitt — and the American cowboy archetype he so often personifies — is just approaching his prime rather than passing it.
Pitt has had several cinematic successes since he hit 50, including scoring an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role as a washed-up but indomitable stunt double in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In both films — Once Upon a Time and F1 — Pitt plays the strong silent type ... as in, he barely speaks. He performs through monosyllabic phrases, snarky facial contortions and, most importantly, extreme physical expressions that are often violent.
It was roughly 10 years ago that Pitt also went through a public divorce from Actress Angelina Jolie. Barely any public conversation has been had about the allegations made by Jolie that Pitt physically abused her and her children. The most reporting out there seems to be this Vulture article about how neatly Pitt's F1 press tour has managed to steer around the accusations; Pitt's bad behavior has not come up in a single interview.
The mess of Pitt’s loaded reputation is ironic considering F1’s successful framing of Pitt as the sustained epitome of cool amid a changing mainstream culture. In the movie, Pitt is cast as Sunny Hayes, a racer who gets a rare chance to return to Formula One and revive an underdog team after taking 30 years away following a fiery far crash that injured his back. He butts heads with his new teammate, a British rookie named Joshua Pearce played by Damson Idris.
Hayes is white, middle-aged, American. Pearce is Black, young, British. Pearce trains using high grade equipment at the McLaren Technology Centre; fashions himself in European luxury brands like Wales Bonner; is friends with the press. Hayes runs old-school laps around the race track; dresses down in ‘70s-style Levi’s everyday; avoids the media at all costs. Pearce calls Hayes old and obsolete. Hayes comes for Pearce’s character, labeling him arrogant and narcissistic.
Pearce is modeled after Lewis Hamilton, a real-life racing star who became the first Black driver in 2008 to win the F1 world driver’s championship. Hamilton produced the film and makes cameos as himself throughout. Hayes, on the other hand, seems inspired by a fictional persona that whiffs of Pitt. He is a nomad who never works with one crew for more than a single season, boasts a string of ex-wives and has a hard time learning to be a team player. Since his first movie appearance as a sexy lady’s man in Thelma and Louise who sleeps with the protagonist before stealing her cash and taking off, Pitt has been pegged as a charming swindler.
The film nods at nuance by forging a round-about relationship between two men with seemingly equivalent star power potential. Pitt evolves from an early stance asserted after his first return F1 race: “Just don’t ask me to give up my position.” Throughout the season, he finds ways to sacrifice his rank to help Pearce, and thereby the team, come out on top.
In the end, F1 is, as its title suggests, totally formulaic. There’s a villainous plot twist, a hard-to-get love interest, and a life-or-death race to the finish line. In the end, Brad Pitt wins it all, as Pearce applauds in the background. In turn, Pitt proves he’s still with it. He’s still, at 61, a cool guy.
The question is whether the movie wins at selling Pitt and the American cowboy trope back to its audience. Oddly enough, the old Hollywood formula works here. It builds a feel-good, suspenseful story that asserts American familiarity into a globalist game. I was engaged, all gas, no breaks, for two and a half hours.
Formula 1 has long been a secondary and typically niche interest compared to leagues like Nascar among Americans. They’re two different spectacles; Nascar is a patriotic party branded by girls in bikinis and relatively reckless driving. Formula 1 is an elite game of technological innovation. Nascar drivers are like cowboys. Formula One drivers are like astronauts. In many ways, Nascar encapsulates the past while Formula 1 embraces the future.
What kinds of career repercussions Pitt should face because of his bad behavior are not the issue of this article. But the indifference of the public to the allegations and Apple TV’s interest in maintaining Pitt as the picture of heroism highlights that we have not collectively gotten over outdated ideas of “cool.” What Pitt has in common with real F1 drivers is that their teams are quick; they know how to brand and sell his celebrity, even as the global culture ostensibly moves away from fawning over shitty Boomer white men.
Ever seen the 1991 comedy City Slickers? It’s a movie about a bunch of Manhattan yuppies (including Billy Crystal and Daniel Stern) who combat their midlife crises by taking a supervised cattle drive across the southwest in hopes of awakening their latent masculinity. The previews that preceded F1 encapsulated the psychological battle embedded in the film. Guys are going to the theater to see movies like Roofman and Nobody 2 that star body builders like Channing Tatum acting like everyday dudes who turn out to be secret superheroes in under two hours.
But it's not just men undergoing masculinity crises who subscribe to the sport of keeping Brad Pitt going. The collision of Pitt and Formula 1 is a way of reaching the broader populace.
The British reality show series Drive to Survive has garnered mass interest in the F1 sport. This spring, a Formula 1 arcade opened its third national location in Philadelphia, giving everyday people the chance to cosplay as high-speed superstars. The spectator complex built around racing is a recipe for modern American entertainment: It’s a balanced blend of risk-induced dopamine overstimulation and physical passivity. F1 the movie is the most American meta embodiment of this ideal yet; as Pitt pretends to race on screen, we (myself included) are content to settle for the familiar and the formulaic, to remain quiet and unmoved, so long as we're kept entertained.
As a movie-going experience, F1 shows that new characters and fresh storylines are mere mistresses to Hollywood. Hollywood (in this case as a metonym for Apple TV) remains happily wed to the good old days. Maybe the real question is whether Pitt's divorce ever even happened.
