Apparently Robert Altman was hesitant to direct The Company which is peculiar because Barbara Turner’s screenplay could almost be a homage to Altman’s own cinematic style. It revolves around a lightly fictionalised version of the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago and largely features professional dancers and non-professional actors, with the exception of Malcolm McDowell, who plays the head of the company, Neve Campbell, who plays a dancer, and James Franco, who plays her boyfriend. The films of Altman’s classic period are remarkable in that they are not driven by character or by plot but by great group rhythms, whether of dancing, driving, gambling or some other collective pursuit. A dance company is a natural subject for him then, as we see in the opening sequence, a piece that sees the dancers connected by a long piece of rhythm that they intertwine and configure until they have become a single entity. From there we cut to the same dancers entering the Joffrey School, amid the more familiar Altmanesque overlapping voices and planes of focus, setting up the contrast that drives the film: collectivism expressed through formalism versus collectivism expressed through naturalistic ambience. Yet the opening dance also ends with a lone figure on the stage and the morning session at Joffrey is juxtaposed by another performer rehearsing to their Discman, raising the questions that percolate throughout the film: how does the countercultural collectivity of Altman’s 60s and 70s output look in the digital 00s and is it still able to undercut the trenchant individualism of the American mainstream?

In responding to that question, The Company largely unfolds as a series of dance sequences that commemorate and contemplate Altman’s legacy in formalist terms. The first of these is a ballet performance in Central Park as a thunderstorm approaches, set to the sultry static of “My Funny Valentine.” The threshold between audience and dancers electrifies, dissolves, turns porous, the storm drawing them into a collective compact prepared to weather the elements. The dancers only just finish before the stage becomes to wet to perform upon, making their movements more precious, precarious and open to intermingling with the energy of the audience. Finally, these two spaces fuse entirely, as the audience join the dancers on stage for the afterparty as the storm finally breaks, sirens wailing in the distance as the city is drenched in the background. This contagious collective energy, with its capacity to incorporate the viewer into a new ensemble, drove Altman’s New Hollywood output, and is thus still tentatively available here, albeit as a high culture artifact, a rarefied New York experience. Still, the continuity with cinema remains, as Altman reminds us with the projection-like bursts of lightning that illuminate the audience.

Several more dance projects ensue that rotate this communal spirit in different ways. In one, a choreographer proposes a “cosmic” production that requires the actors to rehearse without music, before the score is fully written, so that they can listen to the “rhythm of their own bodies” in connection – the haptic language of Altman’s sprawling masterworks. In another performance, the dancers, clad in ritualistic red, kneel in a circle and hold their hands up to the ceiling, in an echo of the New Age spirit of Hair and the tribal 60s. Another sequence depends upon shadow play and silhouette to present a cast of dancers as part of a single body (politic), reaching out their hands to create a Hindu-like deity with many limbs, one more nod in the direction of the spiritual side of Altman’s beloved counterculture. However, the central piece in the film is an abstracted homage to the 60s, which McDowell’s manager explains to his younger crew by invoking: “Kids all over the country, protesting against the war, trying to change the world…peace marches, singing their songs in the streets, carrying flowers when they were being beat and pushed around…all that went into this ballet.” In other words, the ballet is the 60s distilled into a formalist haptics, an abstracted collectivity, the essence of Altman’s film language. In doing so, it distills something very particular about that language: its utopian belief in the power of movement. McDowell’s manager insists that “thinking the movement is not becoming the movement”; that is, that there is something irreducibly embodied about countercultural thought, and that every social “movement” must have its commencement in an ineluctably physical one.

That makes quite a contrast to the romance between Campbell and Franco’s characters, Ry and Josh, which is fairly sluggish by comparison. Campbell and Franco may be top billed but their relationship is remarkably incidental and would make most sense situated in a massive web of connections a la Nashville. Yet that sprawling canvas can now only be expressed in the formalist and contained language of dance, meaning that the film moves quite strangely between the semi-individuation of Ry and Josh and the broader ensemble of the troupe. What little tension (or narrative) occurs in their relationship enacts this tension between individual and group, as when Josh cooks Ry a New Year’s Eve meal but she chooses to party all night with her colleagues instead. For the rest of the time, their screen presence subsists on scenes when not much is happening apart from loose motifs of connection: Josh on the phone watching Ry break the balls on a billard table, collectivity dispersing into chaos. The result is a very specific early 00s structure of feeling, that of ambient slice-of-life films just before reality television took over, New Hollywood vibes that feel like a period effect in a world where the broader ambience of omniscient social media doesn’t quite exist yet.

The Company is thus haunted and preoccupied above all with the slackening and waning of the collective spirit of the counterculture, culminating with the Joffrey Ballet’s annual Christmas “Roast,” when the young dancers replay two key moments of the film as farce: the opening ribbon dance and McDowell’s speech about the 60s. The way they reimagine the dance is especially instructive: rather than sharing a single ribbon, they use masking tape and deliberately tangle it, evoking a shift from collective to network, anticipating the rise of messier, less legible and possibly less tractable forms of togetherness. That contrast is poignantly encapsulated when Altman cuts from a teacher modelling a new arm movement to the thrusting motion of a ten pin bowler who celebrates their win with a pirouette. This bowling alley feels like a quintessential space from one of Altman’s 70s films but its communal import is bookended by the formalist haptics of the dance company, a perfect cipher for this period piece of a movement that Altman so beautifully distilled.