A few years ago, a taut and well-made reality TV series called Drive to Survive plunged uninitiated viewers, like this critic, into the highly competitive and surprisingly dramatic world of Formula 1 racing.

The show, which premiered on Netflix in 2019 but gained significant traction during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, helped popularize the motor racing sport in the U.S. Ferrari, Mercedes and Red Bull weren’t just brands of luxury cars and caffeinated beverages, but teams aggressively vying for Grand Prix titles around the world. Monaco, Silverstone, Baku and Singapore weren’t cities, but ways to measure progress within a season, which consisted of 24 races between March and December. And Lewis Hamilton, Max Verstappen, George Russell and Charles Leclerc weren’t just people, but drivers whose names gained far more meaning as my lockdown pod energetically discussed their lives on and off the track. 

Part of what made Drive to Survive (now in its seventh season) so gripping was how deeply it immersed viewers into this unfamiliar world and portrayed the clash between individual pursuits of glory and the success of the team. It only takes a few episodes to realize that drivers aren’t just competing with athletes from other teams; they are fighting with their partners for leads as narrow as a tenth of a second.

Joseph Kosinki understands the excitement of this tension, and that’s what makes F1: The Movie so thrilling. The film, which lands in theaters June 27 before a streaming release on Apple TV+, is a deft addition to a sturdy lineage of motorsport flicks, from Rush and Gran Turismo to Ford v Ferrari and, most recently, Ferrari. 

But what sets F1 apart from those other offerings is how impressively Kosinki threads the realities of Formula 1 into his fictional narrative. Collaborating again with his Top Gun: Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger and DP Claudio Miranda, the director shapes a high-octane adventure about the late-career return of a once promising premier motorsport driver. The formidable cast — led by a fine Brad Pitt and a compelling Damson Idris — and the crew filmed for 18 months during more than a dozen real Grands Prix. The leads drove real F1 race cars and, as in Top Gun, Miranda and Kosinki experimented with how far they could take the camera to precisely capture the addictive energy of living on the edge. There are scenes in F1 that put viewers in the car so as to translate the feelings conjured by such proximity to, well, death. 

Sonny Hayes, played with a devil-may-care attitude by Pitt, lives to drive. When we meet the former professional motorist, he’s competing in 24 Hours of Daytona, an endurance race in Florida. After he secures the lead, helping the team to victory, Sonny, uninterested in the glamour or the glory, takes his paycheck and maps a route to Ensenada, where a random company is seeking drivers.

But the low-profile driver’s cross-country road trip plans are intercepted after he runs into his old friend and former teammate, who now owns a struggling Formula 1 team. Reuben (a winning Javier Bardem) begs Sonny to be the second driver to his rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris, excellent) so that APXGP can win one race. If they don’t, a desperate Reuben warns, the board will fire him and dissolve the team. 

Of course, Sonny isn’t sure about all of this. He’s still reeling from a near-fatal crash that effectively ended his career 30 years ago. Memories of that disastrous race in Spain, summoned at random and evoked vividly by Stephen Mirrone’s nimble cross-cutting, still haunt him. Reuben remembers that moment, but encourages his friend that he’s still got it. Unlike Joshua, who represents a younger generation of F1 drivers, Sonny is mature and possesses a discipline that could be useful. After a bit of convincing and playful goading, Sonny agrees to help Reuben. 

F1 follows Sonny’s experiences as an older driver trying to regain his footing in a sport that differs greatly from what it was in his heyday. Apart from Kosinki’s portrayal of the races, some of the most exciting elements of F1 grapple with the intergenerational differences between Sonny and Joshua while exploring the way the sport has changed. Formula 1 has always been about money (teams often pay half a million dollars for drivers to compete in races), but like many sports, its athletes must also charm off the track to maintain their relevance. Sonny doesn’t care about any of that, but Josh, one of two Black drivers in this fictionalized version of the league, can’t afford the same attitude. 

Hamilton, the first and only Black driver in Formula 1, helped produce F1 and appears as himself in the film. There’s a poignant moment near the finale where his character briefly locks eyes with Joshua before a race, subtly addressing a key issue of diversity within the sport. It also feels like a nod to the future, in which access to Formula 1 becomes less prohibitively costly and therefore more inclusive. 

Kruger’s screenplay gestures to these issues, but I do wish those threads were sturdier considering how monumental it would be in real life if there were not one but two Black drivers in the sport, as there are in the film. Acknowledging and interrogating that would have invited more nuance into Joshua and Sonny’s relationship, which at a certain point leans into conventional archetypes to keep the story going. What does it mean for this intergenerational pairing of underdogs — the Black Brit and the American, both outsiders to a mostly European sport — to work together?

Still, Joshua gets robust characterization and there are memorable scenes between the young driver and his mother Bernadette (a standout Sarah Niles). She’s fiercely protective of her son, but she also recognizes how Joshua’s ego leads to inappropriate moments of ageism. At times she seems to be channeling Deloris Jordan, played by Viola Davis, in Air. In one early humorous scene, Bernadette forces Joshua to apologize to Sonny for disrespecting the older driver during a press conference. 

Sonny and Joshua clash from the start because their similarities run deeper than either are willing to admit. Joshua possesses a confidence that can border on brash. He’s worked hard to make his way in this world, and part of his cocksure attitude is self-protective. Idris (Snowfall, Swarm) channels these subtler elements of his character’s personality with a performance that relies on understated physicality and softer facial expression. As Joshua deploys sarcastic commentary, his eyes tell a story marked by fear. Sonny understands this — and as the two drivers learn about each other, he learns to read Joshua.

For the most part Pitt plays the hardened protagonist like a rugged cowboy in the Wild West of this luxury sport. Whereas Joshua wears clean-cut, mixed-fabrics looks, as if he’s just stepped off a runway, Sonny opts for various combinations of denim (costumes by Julian Day). 

Most of F1 chronicles how Sonny and Joshua transform their mutual hostility into a healthy competitive spirit. Their personal relationship develops through professional milestones. Kosinki uses each Grand Prix to advance this unlikely friendship as well as to help viewers understand different parts of Formula 1. Early races are about the cars, the speed and the money. Sonny gets acquainted with his vehicle and the lead engineer who built it, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). She’s the first and only woman in her position, and there’s a lot riding on APXGP’s success or failure for her because she rightly wants to prove anyone who doubted her wrong. He also meets the team’s principal Kaspar (Kim Bodnia) and Peter Banning, an eager but slippery board member played by Tobias Menzies.

Later races shift focus from the mechanical to the emotional, showing how each member of the team — from the drivers to the pit workers — must self-regulate and collaborate to gain any leads where they can. In the words of one character, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” 

The strongest scenes in F1, which boasts a two-and-a-half hour runtime, are these moments during race weekends, when Kosinki embeds his fictional team with real ones. Fans of the sport will recognize cameos from Verstappen, Leclerc, Carlos Sainz, Lando Norris and many more drivers. Hans Zimmer’s adrenalized score ups the ante, adding tension to already nail-biting moments like a driver making a dangerous turn on a slick course or mechanics in the pit having mere seconds to switch out a car’s tires.

The impressive craft of these scenes extends to Kosinki’s exploration of the various technologies, like road simulators, used to help drivers gain any advantage. Of course, there are some unrealistic elements in F1, bits that might have sticklers raising an eyebrow, but the film doesn’t feel any less dramatic than the real thing.