Mr Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is long, messy, very violent and out last weekend in the US. We went to see it and this is what we were left with.

How rare? Who else could, in their ninth film, or 90th, make a film about our heroes’ fallibility? In 2019? More than anything else, more than hating hippies, more than nostalgia fetish, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is about the ways in which our gods, the religious icons on our big and small screens, are a mess. In some cases, sympathetic messes, but not heroic. And certainly not superheroic.

And people are going to have thoughts about the language around and depiction of people of colour, particularly Mr Bruce Lee. If Mr Lee is an apex hero for many film buffs, martial arts enthusiasts and T-shirt-slogan philosophers, Mr Quentin Tarantino devotes a lot of screen time to knocking him down, literally.

Have we mentioned that he hates hippies? The climax of the film features a longhair getting curb stomped, for want of a better description. Hippies are to this film what the Nazis were to Inglourious Basterds. And the film feels like a series of dramaturgical rants, against Mr Lee, against the future, against everything except margaritas, maybe.

One of the stars, Mr Brad Pitt, is sort of famously sober. The other, Mr Leonardo DiCaprio, is playing someone struggling with alcohol. The strangely hokey narration by Mr Kurt Russell claims alcohol to be the best and maybe only alloy for male bonding (or male goodbyes, really). And yet we challenge you to not immediately want a margarita upon leaving the cinema.

That and wanting to invest in white denim. Mr Pitt wears an entire Canadian tuxedo for the latter part of the film and makes a determined and strong case for bootcut jeans. We wonder if the white denim endorsement will not be more persuasive.

Mr Pitt remains the most unfair and unrealistic of body ideals ever foisted on the film-going public – all 6ft and extra medium well into his, what, fifties? He makes everything look good. Aviators, obviously, suede moccasins, for sure, and especially a vintagey Hawaiian shirt. He makes the Hawaiian shirts (worn over a Champion spark plugs shirt tucked into his blue jeans and cowboy buckle) so striking that, for a time, many of the hippies in the film merely refer to him as Hawaiian Shirt.

In many ways, this is a film about ageing, a three-hour, $95m movie about two weathered white men (a two hander of a movie where the guys aren’t really ever together), one with some wisdom, the other riddled with insecurity. And in some ways it functions as Mr Pitt’s Taken or John Wick, or at least his audition tape for one of those Viagra-commercials-cump-action movies that star men of a certain age. And he has the funniest bits in the whole picture.

Hot overhead light blowing out tables for ever. Messrs Tarantino and Bob Richardson so lovingly address nostalgia, fetishising vintage objects, shopfronts, marquees and, in a gloriously indulgent sequence, the neon signage of old Los Angeles, that you almost want to go back to the summer of love. Until you begin to feel sick from all the chain-smoking, the smog and grubby emissions from gas-guzzling cars, which they also halo with Mr Richardson’s lovely backlighting.

Despite belching out all the wreck and ruin that is about to kill us all in a few years (with no apparent traffic whatsoever in Los Angeles), the cars of the 1960s were undeniably beautiful. Ms Sharon Tate’s 911. The XKJ parked across the cul de sac from her home. The Cadillac and Karmann Ghia Mr Pitt drives. All gorgeous and all part of what drove us to this dead end. Speaking of which, this film comprises an abundance of cul de sacs – the one in which Mr DiCaprio’s character and Ms Tate (Ms Margot Robbie) live, the one in which every Western town is shaped (whether constructed, as in the backlot on which Mr DiCaprio is shooting his TV show, or real in the case of the bunny ranch on which Mr Pitt finds himself). There are cul de sacs of plot and purpose, too. All those rants and expositions of 50-year-old tabloid gossip (and a whole storyline about a wife killing?) going who knows where.

…were a thing in 1969, or at least in Mr Tarantino’s idealised version of it. And, we have to say, not mad at it. Even with everyone wearing gold chains over rollnecks, we’d jump right on the trend.

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