… Brad Pitt isn’t getting older; he’s getting better. In F1, he plays a scruffy, aging driver who trundles from town to town in a van kitted out with life’s essentials—a bunk, a small bookcase, a pull-up bar—answering the call whenever anyone needs some random Joe to man a fast car. This is no way to make a living. As we watch him prepare for the movie’s first race, a small-town affair where his takeaway amounts to just $5,000, he’s a crazy wildflower bouquet of jangled nerves: he does a few desperate last-minute pull-ups, dunks his face in a tiny basin of ice water, and superstitiously slips a playing card into the pocket of his jumpsuit. Then he jumps into a car’s cockpit, and wins. Pitt’s character is Sonny Hayes, a perfect movie name for an almost-has-been if ever there were one. He takes his tiny check and drives off into the sunset—or, rather, to the laundromat, where an old friend and colleague, Javier Bardem’s Ruben Cervantes, locates him after having searched for him for ages. Ruben tries to tempt Sonny into one last…well, you know.-TIME