Ever since Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola has been chasing the auteurist high of creating one of the most groundbreaking films in cinematic history. He almost achieved it again with One From The Heart, his multi-million dollar musical set on a life-sized simulation of Las Vegas. From that point onwards, however, he was unable to develop a project commensurate to his ambitions. Unlike Martin Scorsese, Coppola was never content (or modest) enough to make a solid genre film along the lines of Cape Fear, Gangs of New York or Shutter Island. Even The Rainmaker strains for the classicism and naturalism of his New Hollywood period, while most of Coppola’s other work since Apocalypse Now falls into one of two categories – frustrated or impotent ultra-auteurist projects, or films about frustrated auteurist figures, such as Tucker: The Man and His Dream, Dracula and Jack. Yet from the moment he completed Apocalypse Now, Coppola started working on a film that might be commensurate to it – a film that, nearly a century down the track, has finally and improbably come to us, financed almost entirely by Coppola himself, in his last major summative work.

Of course, none of that is to say that Megalopolis can match Apocalypse Now, or even the mid-tier entries in Coppola’s work, although it is much more impressive than the informal trilogy of Youth Without Youth, Tetro and Twixt, if only by virtue of its enormous and sublime scale. And it is that scale of ambition that Megalopolis shares with Apocalypse Now, the crazy auteurism of an eighty-five year old director throwing absolutely everything at the wall over the duration of half his working life. No surprise then that Megalopolis feels like many films in one (there is surely a ten hour director’s cut in the works) although at its core there is a clear thread here, as Coppola provides us with an allegorical vision of the end of the American Empire. Drawing on industrialist and magnate narratives, such as Citizen Kane and The Fountainhead, that have become central to America’s mythology of itself, Coppola presents us with New Rome – a classicist version of New York City whose citizens sport Roman demomyns, interact in iambic pentameter, and visit the Circus Maximus for entertainment, all while getting rich off their considerable financial portfolios and Wall Street investments. We glimpse this world through a sprawling ensemble cast that includes Aubrey Plaza, Shia LaBeouf, Talia Shire, Jon Voight, Dustin Hoffman, Jason Schwartzman and Giancarlo Esposito.

At the heart of this panoramic vision is Cesar, an architect played by Adam Driver, who has discovered a new substance named Megalon that he believes can revitalise the New York skyline, ethos and economy. What ensues is an immersion experience that is more than the sum of its parts, and best seen on IMAX. Coppola anchors his film in the monumentalist architecture of Old New York, and the Chrysler Building in particular, as Cesar pronounces that Megalon will revolutionise the cityscape as categorically as steel did a century and a half before, ushering in a second Manhattan construction boom. Megalopolis thus feels attuned to the late nineteenth century public sphere, full of jostling, embodied, theatrically present voices, as evinced in a municipal planning body that barely bats an eyelid when Cesar marks his entrance with a declamation of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. Yet for all the supposed futurism of Coppola’s vision, digital technology is conspicuously absent, or at least absorbed into the shapeshifting quality of Megalon. This is a Gilded Age vision of the future, and has more in common with fin-de-siecle science fiction that with the twenty-first century. That retrofuturism feels apt for a film that was conceived before many of its cast members were born but that also plays like a last hurrah for actors of Hoffman, Voight and Shire’s ilk.

Against that architectural backdrop, Megalopolis brims with the anarchic, tasteless, sensuous energy of the American Empire at its late nineteenth century peak, harkening back to a time when the world at large had no option but to listen to the United States. Perhaps that’s why Coppola’s screenplay is strongest when it doesn’t aspire to dialogue and instead opts for silence or monologic pronouncements. Most of the “dialogue” is expositional or incidental anyway, functioning as distractions from the sequences of images and gestures, the abstractions of imperial decadence that Coppola does so well, as when two characters tug at either end of an imaginary rope as they make their way through a party. Coppola’s project seems to be to recover the atavistic, ritualistic and ceremonial energies of peak American capital from their latency or dormancy amidst the “historical” architecture of neoclassicism. His approach reminded me of one of the final scenes in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime in which J.P. Morgan travels to Egypt to commune with the Pyramids, believing himself to be, like the Pharaohs, one of the “great men” who are regularly reincarnated throughout history. Megalon encapsulates these mystical potentialities still lurking in the heyday of New York, evoking a monumental skyline that hasn’t quite taken shape and can’t be entirely visualised.

There’s something exhilarating about these tableaux of decadence, especially in an American public sphere where both right and left wing politics have adopted rhetorics of purity over the last decade. In one of the most memorable scenes in the Circus Maximus, a vestal virgin’s display is reaching climax when a sex tape featuring her glitches into the livefeed. For the briefest of moments the crowd is shocked by this retrospective deflowering, only for her stocks to rise even more with the exclusive and elite. Speaking of this sex tape, so tied to the media world of the late 2000s, Megalopolis brims with the cultural arcana of the last forty years (Occupy Wall Street is another point of reference), turning it into a kind of accumulated history of the present, a palimpsest of Coppola’s artistic evolution, a gesamtkunstwerk that unifies his entire body of work, or at least evokes its full disparate sweep, not unlike David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return or more distantly, but just as luridly, Stephen King’s Dark Tower cycle. That makes Megalopolis oddly dated and timeless all at once, and turns time into the central preoccupation of the film. “Artists can never lose their control of time,” Cesar announces as he scans the skyline envisaging the title city, constructed entirely of Megalon, but he’s doing so from the top of the Chrysler Building, the horizon (for most of the film) for what might be imagined for the future. The flipside of Coppola tapping into these arcane historical energies is that even the most science fictional moments here already feel historical.

At least that’s true for most of the film. There is, however, a notable exception about midway through, a fifteen minute segment that must count amongst the greatest things Coppola has ever committed to cinema. Rivalling the opening shot of The Conversation, the Lake Tahoe scene in The Godfather II and the Flight of the Valkyries in Apocalypse Now, Coppola reveals his even more fundamental project in Megalopolis: to restore the cinema as a demos, a public sphere, a civic space of discussion and debate. This section starts with a live component, in which an usher addresses a series of questions to Cesar on the screen, momentarily transforming the theatre into a press conference. Cesar answers the usher’s questions by observing that dialogue is utopian in and of itself, and this galvanises the most beautiful sequence of the film. Drawing on his muse in Abel Gance’s Napoleon, Coppola divides the screen in three to show us our one and only panoramic vision of the planned city of Megalopolis. Sometimes the three panels show a single aerial image, sometimes they show discrete images and sometimes their boundaries are confounded, evoking Megalon itself as an inherently prismatic substance, involuting, fractallating and enjoining Coppola, as Napoleon himself called upon Gance, to develop a new cinematic language, or a new sensory language, that he can’t quite contain in images alone. As the images ripple and shimmer across the screen, Cesar quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson’s maxim that man will eventually die out from too much civilisation, and yet Megalopolis doesn’t ask us to wind the clock back to some putative state of nature but to the mystical multi-dimensional aura of capital itself in its most primally American incarnation. This, then, is the dissonant and sublime core of Megalopolis: Coppola’s effort to reroute late capitalism back through high transcendentalism.

Yet herein lies the rub of Megalopolis too – for all the time and energy that Coppola devotes to classical allusions and allegorical exposition, the narrative of city-building is underdeveloped. This, to me, was the most extraordinary omission of the film, along with the lack of any real attention to Megalon, and yet it makes sense too. For Cesar apotheosises the thwarted visionary who has haunted Coppola ever since Apocalypse Now, and the architecture and cityscape of the projected Megalopolis is refracted through that frustrated yearning. Like Megalon, Coppola’s film is prismatic, gesturing towards a fourth dimension, something outside the screen, even as it is unable to aestheticise the architectural vision that should be its core concern, a contradiction that the script acknowledges in the third act, when Cesar is shot in the face, and has a Megalon implant in his cheek to cover up the gun wound. With Megalon now embedded in Cesar’s body, he is unable to fully externalise it as a new iteration of New York and so, like Coppola, like the film itself, he ends with part of his vision still trapped deep inside him, only rising to the surface in lurid and absurd auteurist gestures.

Of course, there are many other criticisms you could make of Megalopolis. For such an expensive film it looks quite cheap, and often seems to be shot in the apartments of Coppola’s friends and family. The screenplay alternates between being overcooked and undercooked and lots of the cast seem lost amidst the maximalism of it all. Strange as it may sound, at two hours and twenty minutes it’s much too short for the world that Coppola has built. And yet there is something about the sheer auteurist extravagance and daring on display here that is deeply affecting. It’s this same hubris, after all, that allowed Coppola to make some of the greatest films in history, and just because it doesn’t work every time doesn’t mean the energy doesn’t mean something, especially when the man behind the camera is approaching ninety. No wonder the film is preoccupied with time, for auteurism here is whittled down to its fundament – a battle with time, a raging against death – and that makes the older actors especially moving, with Talia Shire bringing me close to tears. “What is time,” Megalopolis asks, “except a curve of future and past around us?” At the core of its messiness and brilliance is a hard pronouncement to ignore: “the human being shall rightly be called a great miracle.”