Finally, after decades of development, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megapolis meets his audience. But who or what constitutes its audience? The film doesn’t seem poised to do well at the box office, and you could argue that thanks to the festival screenings and fancy preview events, a large portion of its intended audience – namely film geeks – has already seen the film. Critics have been mixed on the $120 million epic since its Cannes premiere. Maybe mixed is a term that is not strong enough. Let’s say wildly divided. Sometimes they are extremely divided within the same review. Not long ago I was talking to a filmmaker who said they were watching Megapolis alternately staring at the screen in awe and holding their heads in their hands in shame.

That’s pretty close to how I felt when I saw it Megapolis at Cannes in May. The film contains authentic passages of great beauty, but often falters in telling simple stories. It has some beautiful set pieces, but just as many scenes feel overexposed and flat, uninspired and awkward. Its conceptual quirks – the verse dialogue, the neo-Roman hair and costume design – can be endearing, but the performances are all over the place and not every actor seems to have gotten the memo. Of course, critics won’t agree on what that memo even is was. Is Aubrey Plaza’s self-consciously vampy, campy performance a cunning part of the film’s zany design? Or is it just a misguided exaggeration? Does Jon Voight know he’s there?

That would explain the strangely confrontational way it can happen Megapolis has been rolled out. A few weeks ago, Lionsgate received criticism (some of it from me) for releasing a trailer that featured fake quotes from some of history’s most notable film critics. Whatever idiot decides to let artificial intelligence come up with negative quotes from people like Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris about films like The godfather certainly stirred controversy, but they also distracted everyone’s attention from the most interesting aspect of the trailer: prior to the film’s release, Coppola & Co. targeted critics for not appreciating the maestro’s work. Their statement seemed to be this: “The godfather, Apocalypse nowAnd Dracula by Bram Stoker were all big hits, and, gee, if critics hated those movies, how can they ever be trusted with the new ones?

It doesn’t matter that this wasn’t an accurate reading of history – or of the present. Because critics, for all their mixed reactions, have been kinder Megapolis than the average audience is likely to be. I count myself among those critics. I was never bored Megapolis. For all its many flaws, it is too crazy and alive to ignore, ignore or forget. Earlier this month I rewatched Coppola’s film at the Toronto International Film Festival and I was pretty sure I’ll watch it again before it leaves theaters. (Granted, I may have to act quickly.) Megapolis will never be a normal film, but plays infinitely better with repeated viewings. And while it could easily be dismissed as the bizarre rantings of an outrageous, over-the-hill artist lost in his own ideas and surrounded by yes-men, the intensely personal nature of the film, the way it blends raw sincerity with an unapologetic weirdness, forcing you to look deeper. And in this case, it helps to have some familiarity with the creator’s life and career.

“I grew up in a family that moved every six months,” Coppola said in an interview years ago. “I attended 22 schools before going to college. I was always the lonely newbie. And you can never completely shake off that kind of impression when you’re very young. Why did I make a movie like The conversationa film with a lonely older man who lives alone and eavesdrops on people? There must be some aspect of that in me. But a filmmaker must naturally have some extroverted qualities: otherwise it is difficult to get dozens, sometimes hundreds, of people to do what you want. As a director and mini-magnate, Coppola always tried to create collectives, cooperatives and partnerships. He surrounded himself with other filmmakers and in some cases helped finance their passion projects. He longed for a studio like the early days of United Artists, a company founded and run by artists.

Yet there was also something distant and lonely about him. Watch his wife Eleanor’s amazing documentary, Hearts of darknessabout making Apocalypse nowand you will see, at the center of that legendarily chaotic, multimillion-dollar epic, someone who is, at that moment, the loneliest man in the world. In later years, Coppola was known for preparing his productions by inviting the cast to his home for home-cooked meals and collegiate rehearsal sessions. But on set, he was reportedly often confined to his famous Silverfish, the state-of-the-art Airstream trailer from which he could direct the action like a lone god. This has always been the paradox of his career. He longs for connection, but also lives in his own head.

That paradox also underlies this Megapolis. It’s a film full of big ideas, and while they aren’t always worth it, it does push you to wrestle with them. “Is this society the only one available to us?” asks Adam Driver’s Cesar Catilina during a press conference about halfway through the film. “And if we ask these questions, if there is a dialogue about it, it is actually a utopia.” These lines are also all over the trailers; they are clearly important to Coppola. It is also significant that this scene is where the ‘live cinema’ element of the film takes place: when at some screenings a real person stands in front of a microphone to ‘ask’ Cesar a question. (The audio is unfortunately pre-recorded.) Coppola reportedly hoped early on that this could be a full audience participation moment. He asked Amazon to develop voice recognition software that would allow viewers to question Cesar. The director’s idea that utopia is not a fixed state, but a conversation about the future, reflects his approach to filmmaking itself. “I’ve always felt that when you make a movie, you’re basically asking a question,” he said in our aforementioned interview. “And when you’re done, the movie you have is the answer.”

But Megapolis itself doesn’t contain much debate about the future of the city or the world in which it is set. There is some general language about ‘the now’ and ‘the eternal’, but there is little actual specificity. Cesar, a visionary but self-centered architect, spends much of the film monologuing, and the substance he pioneered, Megalon, has vague, undefined properties; it’s more magic than science.

And yet the conversation about the future that the film lacks could very well be provided by its existence. Coppola has made a film that we can fight about, make big claims about, and accuse each other of. In another era, a film like this might have caused riots at screenings; Nowadays there is a greater chance of playing in empty halls. But that doesn’t stop us from talking about it – whether it’s about the form, or the wild risks of spending your own money on a crazy dream project, or the feasibility of live cinema, or whether the director is has lost marbles, or whether critics can be trusted. In that sense, Coppola may have achieved his dream. For one shining moment, he created in the world outside his head the conversations he apparently had in it. The public participation element of Megapolis is not some poor zhlub standing in the dark with a dead microphone. It’s us.