A monstrous, mischievous, majestic mess.

If there’s one thing Hollywood loves, it’s Hollywood. Never one to pass up the opportunity to self-indulge, Tinsel Town telling tales of Tinsel Town has been a regular occurrence for decades.

From Singing in the Rain to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood via The Player, whether celebration or cautionary tale, these self-aggrandising stories are baked into Hollywood’s very DNA.

With so many likeminded films-about-filmmaking out there, can anything new truly be offered within this niche Hollywood has carved out for itself? And, if so, is Damien Chazelle’s Babylon the one to do it?

In an era of unbridled decadence in 1920s Hollywood, the lives of several characters intertwine in a tale of outsized ambition and outrageous excess. Tracing the interconnecting stories of ambitious young actress Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), alcoholic leading man Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), big screen dreamer Manny Torres (Diego Calva), and talented trumpeter Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo), their lives and careers are about to collide in a maelstrom of ambition, disappointment, and debauchery

Oh Babylon, you absolute mess. You beautiful, bold, bizarre mess.

With barely a plot to be seen, its three-and-a-bit-hours running time and chaotic approach to both structure and character mean you’ll be hard pressed to find a more undisciplined, unruly film than Babylon out there. And it’s all the better for it.

Shambolic and unruly though it may be, Babylon nevertheless delivers the kind of hedonistic viewing experience its premise promises. From messy beginning to messy end, the film makes no bones about what it is, and the result, while utterly exhausting at times, is never less than exhilarating.

In contrast to Damien Chazelle’s previous Hollywood trip, La La Land, Babylon feels like the director letting his hair down and his freak flag fly. If its predecessor took a somewhat romanticised look at Hollywood, Babylon takes those rose-tinted glasses off, throws up on them, grinds them into a fine powder, and shoves them right up its nose.

What at times feels more like a string of randomised short skits than a coherent movie, Babylon’s plot plays second fiddle to its all-encompassing chaos energy. From the ridiculous debaucheries of the extended party opening, you know precisely how wild Damien Chazelle’s ride is going to be, and while nausea will hit you like a tonne of bricks at points, the cumulative effect is impossible to resist.

In truth, Babylon doesn’t say anything that the likes of Singing in the Rain and Sunset Boulevard weren’t saying decades ago, yet, what the story lacks in originality, it certainly makes up for in anarchic exuberance.

Feeling like a dozen films squished into one, Babylon is huge in every sense of the word. It’s a big, bloated, 189-minute-long mush of ideas and narrative strands that, tumultuous though they may be, somehow work. While it’s hard to argue that Babylon’s bladder-testing runtime isn’t complete overkill, with so much going on and the wild sensory experience it all grows into, it’s not as much of an issue as first feared.

To even attempt half these things in what is a big, expensive studio movie, Damien Chazelle is a madman, yet he somehow sews it all together, and for that alone, he must take a huge amount of credit. With the help of Linus Sandgren’s cinematography, Tom Cross’ editing, and Justin Hurwitz’s scorching, jazz-drenched score, Chazelle crafts a bombastic, hypnotic, frequently nightmarish slice of early-Hollywood life.

There’s no doubt about it, Babylon is a huge swing for a relatively inexperienced director, but with his past record of both critical and financial success, Chazelle has certainly earned the right to take it. Perhaps emboldened by the starry presence of Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt alongside him, Chazelle runs riot with what is clearly a passion project of his, and while it’s tough to tell how such a raucous film will land with audiences, it’s hard not to be impressed by the sheer ballsiness of it all.

Despite the sheer weight of this star power, it’s somewhat surprising that both Robbie and Pitt are well and truly outshone by their lower profile co-stars. It’s not that either lead are poor per-say, rather that both are doing the act we’ve seen many times before, with Margot Robbie leaning into the Harley Quinn/Tanya Harding messiness and Brad Pitt doing, well, Brad Pitt.

Despite their top billing and on-screen prominence, Babylon is very much an ensemble piece, and it’s this mix of characters that swirl around Nellie LaRoy and Jack Conrad that steal the show. Of these, Diego Calva has by far the biggest presence, with Manny’s story feeling the most rounded of anyone among the group, yet it’s Jovan Adepo and Li Jim Li who offer the most, despite their relatively scant screen time.

The snippets of story we get from both Sidney Palmer and Lady Fay Zhu are, ultimately, far more engaging, and intriguing than anything offered by the two leads. Tackling issues of race, gender, sexuality, and identity, both characters’ stories are the true highlights of the sprawling film. It’s just a shame they’re both undersold and underserved by the script, with neither feeling satisfyingly fleshed out.

The snippets that we do get, however, are fantastic, and in amidst Babylon’s chaotic whirlwind of a script, their stories play a crucial part in the film’s beautifully anarchic tapestry. While these threads, like much of the film, feel messy, frayed, and wholly uneven, when woven together, the result is quite spectacular.

Pure, uncut chaos, Babylon is a hot, beautiful mess. Stepping out of his comfort zone and coaxing us out there with him, Damien Chazelle serves up A LOT of film, yet, while it may feel like way too much to comprehend at times, the result is the kind of all singing, all dancing, all-consuming rush cinema was put here to provide.