‘F1: The Movie’ Review: Brad Pitt and Damson Idris Illuminate the Tension and Triumph of High-Stakes Motorsports
Damson Idris as Joshua Pearce and Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes in Apple Original Films’ “F1 The Movie,” now in theaters and IMAX.
A searing, high-velocity meditation on performance, purpose, and the bruising cost of excellence.
Some films seduce you with spectacle. Others grip you by the throat and force you into their world. F1: The Movie, helmed by Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick), does both — then upshifts into a rarified space of sensory immersion and psychological exploration. What emerges is not merely a racing film, but a muscular, kinetic, and haunting drama of legacy, mortality, and human limits. With Brad Pitt as an aging speed demon navigating the scars of his past and Damson Idris as a rising talent caught in the crucible of modern celebrity, Kosinski orchestrates a spectacle that’s as emotionally grounded as it is visually transcendent.
Deploying the formal arsenal that made Top Gun: Maverick a benchmark of modern blockbuster craft, Kosinski expands his cinematic syntax for the singular demands of Formula 1. Real-time footage captured over 18 months at actual Grands Prix gives the film a documentary edge that sharpens the stakes and bleeds authenticity. Yet it’s not merely verisimilitude that defines F1; it’s the masterful integration of narrative, performance, and mise-en-scène. With Claudio Miranda’s lucid cinematography and Hans Zimmer’s muscular score, the film constructs an aesthetic of velocity that mirrors the psychic instability of its characters.
At its center roars Sonny Hayes (Pitt), a haunted ex-pro lured from the fringes of irrelevance back onto the track by Reuben (Javier Bardem), a desperate team owner fighting for survival in the cutthroat world of elite motorsport. Bardem infuses Reuben with manic charm and buried desperation, while Pitt delivers one of his most interior performances — all controlled swagger and sublimated grief. But it’s Damson Idris who emerges as the film’s stealth emotional core, playing Joshua Pearce with a blend of coiled rage, bruised idealism, and reluctant vulnerability.
Javier Bardem as Ruben Cervantes and Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes in Apple Original Films’ “F1 The Movie,” now in theaters and IMAX.
What distinguishes F1 is its refusal to flatten these characters into archetypes. The elder-younger rivalry — so often a formulaic trope — is here rendered with deep psychological shading. The generational friction between Sonny and Joshua becomes a dialectic: not merely about talent versus experience, but about what the sport demands of its participants — and what it destroys. The film interrogates masculine stoicism, racial isolation, and the existential dread of obsolescence. Idris doesn’t play Joshua as a precocious upstart but as a fully human figure shaped by code-switching, media scrutiny, and a historically white institution still resistant to real inclusivity.
The casting of Lewis Hamilton, who produced the film and appears in a stirring cameo, adds real-world gravitas. A moment of silent acknowledgment between his character and Joshua speaks volumes about institutional memory and aspirational legacy. The film knows that history doesn’t just hover at the edges of sport — it defines its architecture. Yet the script by Ehren Kruger resists didacticism. It embeds its critiques in character arcs and cinematic grammar rather than monologues, trusting viewers to feel the implications between lines.
Kerry Condon’s Kate McKenna — the lone female engineer in the pit — further deepens the textural complexity. Her performance is rich with quiet defiance and scientific precision. The gender politics of Formula 1 aren’t addressed directly, but the camera lingers long enough to let Condon’s presence rewrite the frame. Tobias Menzies and Kim Bodnia fill out the managerial spectrum with restrained wit, while Sarah Niles brings steely tenderness as Joshua’s mother — a woman navigating the matrix of maternal fear, Black pride, and high-performance parenting.
Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes and Kerry Condon as Kate in Apple Original Films’ “F1 The Movie,” now in theaters and IMAX.
Kosinski choreographs the racing sequences with balletic clarity and near-philosophical rhythm. The car becomes both crucible and cathedral — a place of reckoning. Every gearshift carries emotional resonance. The editing by Stephen Mirrione refracts time with surgical elegance, collapsing flashbacks into present-tense panic. The use of sound design — engines, breaths, crowd murmurs, tire friction — creates an immersive sonic environment that disorients and grounds simultaneously.
Beyond the visceral, F1 is about the slow attrition of soul under capitalist performance culture. Both Sonny and Joshua are avatars of systems that reward spectacle but punish vulnerability. Pitt’s Sonny is not chasing legacy; he’s trying to redeem failure. Idris’ Joshua is not chasing fame; he’s trying to survive authenticity. Their relationship is fraught with tension, but Kosinski allows it to evolve with patience. Theirs is not an easy alliance, but one hard-earned through mutual recognition of pain.
Some of the film’s most affecting sequences occur not on the track but in moments of bruised stillness: a locker room confrontation, a dawn conversation over espresso, a silent hallway before a race. Here, Kosinski reveals his true ambition — to frame sport not as metaphor, but as method of self-inquiry. The track is merely where these men reveal who they’ve become.
Yes, the narrative occasionally leans on genre scaffolding, and one wishes it lingered longer on some of its sociological subtexts — particularly the economic gatekeeping of F1 and the international pressures on Black excellence. Yet the intelligence of the screenplay lies in its restraint. It allows the viewer to connect thematic dots without over-articulation.
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Visually, the film borders on hallucinatory at times. Miranda’s camera finds poetry in mechanical precision. A wide shot of the grid at golden hour recalls the painterly ethos of impressionism. A slow-motion crash, rendered with surgical beauty, feels like a meditation on entropy. Zimmer’s score weaves in both orchestral propulsion and digital menace, underscoring the film’s tonal duality: reverence and revolt.
F1: The Movie is both an elegy and a battle cry — for old dreams, lost fathers, forgotten victories, and the relentless machinery of reinvention. It asserts that performance is never just about winning, but about endurance, redefinition, and the cost of holding the line. It’s a film that dares to decelerate amid the roar, to find human fragility inside industrial spectacle. That it does so without sacrificing thrill, momentum, or accessibility is its singular achievement.
Rating: ★★★★☆
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