A washed-up race car driver joins a losing Formula One team.

Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon

PG-13 (mild language and brief suggested sexuality)

2:35

Area theaters, opening Friday

A seductive fantasy built around cool cars and an even cooler Brad Pitt.

Fast cars, classic rock, Brad Pitt’s pecs — "F1 The Movie" is precisely engineered to achieve summer blockbuster status. It’s one of those sledgehammer-concept movies whose posters sell it so clearly and completely — Pitt wearing a Formula One suit! — that you might not actually need to see it to feel like you’ve seen it. The good news is that "F1” is thoroughly, unabashedly, shamelessly entertaining, and probably even worth the extra few bucks to watch it in vision-filling IMAX.

Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, once a rising F1 driver until a crash derailed his career. (A cliché, you say? Just you wait.) Now he travels the world, racing indiscriminately — stock cars, dune buggies, anything with wheels. What Dalton was to bouncers in "Road House," Sonny is to racers: Better than you, wiser than you, not really concerned about you. As male fantasies go, this one’s potent (Ehren Kruger wrote the screenplay) and who better to embody it than Pitt? At 61, he can still swagger, sparkle and flash a dazzling smile.

Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), an old rival and now owner of the chronically losing F1 team Apex, finds Sonny in a crummy laundromat and begs him for help. (That’s after they trade insults and c’mere-you hugs.) Sonny arrives to find a well-funded but dysfunctional group: Kaspar (Kim Bodnia), the hidebound team leader; Kate (Kerry Condon), the rare female technical director; and Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the cocky young driver whose ears won’t hear advice. Sonny will be for them colleague, lover and mentor, respectively.

One problem with fantasies is that they can feel one-dimensional. Sonny is such an alpha male that he doesn’t have a single insecurity or weakness (aside from the occasional crash-induced migraine). He’s too self-actualized to need money, fame or validation, so nothing’s riding on anything. As for Pearce, he’s just a youth in need of guidance, overly obsessed with his endorsements and social media followers. ("It’s all just noise," Sonny tells him.) Director Joseph Kosinski ("Top Gun: Maverick") keeps the action flying, with street-level camerawork that captures the feel of tires gripping asphalt, but whenever "F1” lets up on the gas (which is rare), you might catch yourself asking: Why do I care, again?

At any rate, the movie isn’t asking you to invest all your emotions; it’s just asking you to hop in. Even more than the virtual experience of gunning a car at 250 mph, what "F1” is selling is the dream of being Sonny Hayes, a man untouched and untouchable. Characters repeatedly ask him philosophically about racing: "So what is it about?" Hayes is too always too cool, too cryptic to answer.