In “F1,” a snazzy piece of blockbuster engineering, Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a devotee of fast cars, beautiful women, and simple living. A professional gambler and an occasional speed demon for hire, he lives in a beat-up van that he hauls from one racetrack to another. Strapping himself into a car at Daytona International Speedway, he applies just the right proportions of velocity, swagger, and insider know-how to hint at a once great racing career. About thirty years ago, Sonny was an ascendant Formula 1 star—cue many hilarious, grainy video clips of a younger Pitt, with a resplendent golden mullet—until his dreams were dashed by a near-fatal accident, during an attempt to overtake the three-time Formula 1 world champion Ayrton Senna. The invocation of an actual legend and martyr of the sport—Senna died in 1994, after a crash at the San Marino Grand Prix—is meant to supply a jolt of gravitas. Beneath the slick paint job of this movie’s crowd-pleasing fiction, we’re expected to believe, whirs a tough, reality-driven engine. For some, it may also stir memories of the documentary “Senna” (2011), one of the finest of all racing movies. “F1,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, with a script by Ehren Kruger, aspires to the same pantheon.

Does it get there? “F1” is hugely enjoyable and astoundingly well made, but I will leave the question for posterity and for more committed motorheads in the audience to decide. A few will gravitate toward the still cherished spectres of “Grand Prix” (1966) and “Le Mans” (1971); others will invoke such classics of unleaded testosterone as “Days of Thunder” (1990) and “Rush” (2013). Like the latter two films, “F1” is an epic of male aggression. At the urging of an old friend and ex-rival, Ruben (Javier Bardem), Sonny reluctantly agrees to return to Formula 1 and drive for APXGP, a battered team that can barely hold its own against the likes of Ferrari and Mercedes. Sonny strides onto the track with unruffled cool—a Pitt signature—and is laconic enough to endure a series of press conferences at which journalists are quick to label him a has-been. He isn’t much of a team player, and neither is his much younger teammate, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a clout-chasing hothead who refuses to play the deferential protégé to Sonny’s geriatric comeback kid.

Underdog sagas and cross-generational pissing contests are nothing new. Neither are head-turning female love interests, even if the one here, Kate (the splendid Kerry Condon, of “The Banshees of Inisherin”), is APXGP’s technical director, and thus knows the racers’ hardware better than they do. Again and again, “F1” finds fresh pathways into familiar material; it keeps its surface-level moves unpredictable even though its overarching trajectory isn’t. At nearly every race—the locations include Silverstone, U.K.; Monza, Italy; Francorchamps, Belgium; Las Vegas; and Abu Dhabi—Sonny manages to rejigger the rules of the game, to the understandable irritation of Joshua and the rest of the team. The secret to success, he insists, lies in looseness, spontaneity, and thinking so unconventional that it approaches the paradoxical: setbacks are advantages, penalties beget opportunities, and a terrifying crash can hold the key to victory. “Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast,” Sonny tells the mechanics, and his tortoise-and-hare logic applies to the film’s own pacing, which is at once patient and brisk. The editing, by Stephen Mirrione, has a hyperkinetic elegance; the quicker the cutting, the more convincingly the action coheres. The images, shot by Claudio Miranda, alternate between dazzling eagle-eye views of the track and closeups so intense that at times all you can see can is a driver’s fist clenching the wheel.

Kosinski made his feature début with the sci-fi sequel “Tron: Legacy” (2010), and some of that movie’s sleek monochrome world-building persists, amusingly, in APXGP’s white-on-white Apple-store aesthetic. The director’s most salient credit is “Top Gun: Maverick” (2022), which did for Tom Cruise what “F1” seeks to do for Pitt: assemble a grand Hollywood throwback, rife with high-stakes mischief and mentorship, that will affirm the mojo, but also the beneficence, of a gracefully aging star. For all that, it’s when the film slows down to allow Sonny a moment of misty-eyed career introspection that the proceedings slacken, leaving you suddenly impatient to get back to the track. Sonny is never more expressive than when he’s behind the wheel, and this is no time for a Pitt stop.

There are two car scenes of note in “Sorry, Baby,” neither of which involves busted tires or burning vehicles, although both are nonetheless shot through with an unbearable tension. In the first of them, Agnes (Eva Victor), a graduate student at a small New England university, is driving home in shock; something terrible has happened, and what we see behind the windshield is a silent scream of incomprehension and disbelief. In the second, set roughly three years later, a freshly triggered Agnes suffers a full-blown panic attack behind the wheel—one that doesn’t subside until after she pulls over, with a screenwriter’s convenient timing, in front of a kindly stranger’s sandwich shop.

The neatness isn’t a bad thing (and neither, it turns out, are the sandwiches). “Sorry, Baby,” which marks Victor’s début feature as writer and director, unfolds with a precision that never feels persnickety. It consists of five chapters, plucked from across a five-year span of Agnes’s life, and presented out of chronological order. In the first but not earliest chapter—it’s essentially year four—Agnes, now a full-time English professor at the same university, is visited by her former roommate and classmate, Lydie (Naomi Ackie, superb), who lives in New York. They’ve remained close friends, and their bond, intimate and unfailingly loyal, becomes the key to the entire picture. (“Sorry, Baby” is as bound by female friendship as “F1” is by male rivalry.)

Almost immediately, Agnes and Lydie slip into waves of bawdy banter that, although delightfully spontaneous, carry a faint anxiety—as if the two were eager to assert an atmosphere of sexual normalcy. You can already guess at the reason for this, but it becomes emphatically clear in the next chapter, which returns us to year one. Agnes, a student again, is getting notes on her thesis from her adviser, Preston (Louis Cancelmi), who deems her work extraordinary. Indeed, Agnes’s brilliance is already the stuff of campus legend, but his assessment is motivated by more than purely academic considerations. Their last session is held not in a classroom or an office but, by Preston’s last-minute arrangement, at his house. The terrible thing happens, and Victor films it from outside the building, in three hushed, static shots. The swiftly darkening sky tells all.

If “Sorry, Baby” has a thesis of its own, it’s a fluid, liberating, non-deterministic one: simply put, pain and healing assume a range of unique forms, and the tales we tell about them should follow suit. Victor’s script, which won a prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, has an understatedly self-reflexive quality: Agnes, whose academic expertise is in short stories, is fascinated by narrative niceties and unorthodox plot structures. The ultra-discreet visualization of Agnes’s assault is merely one respect in which the film sidesteps the usual strategies of so much trauma fiction. The gentle shuffling of multiple time frames is another, reminding us that the course of emotional repair is neither swift nor strictly linear. Notably, Agnes’s suffering doesn’t give her a desire for revenge or send her packing. Her decision to take a job in the English department—thankfully sans Preston, who leaves the school of his own volition and suffers no legal or professional consequences—reads as a quietly principled refusal to let her worst fears taint her greatest joys. Nor does Agnes’s experience sap her, as a lesser film might suggest, of sexual appetite, thanks in no small part to the proximity of an adorkable neighbor (Lucas Hedges).

The film’s most productively destabilizing element is its humor. Victor has a background in improv comedy, and came to fame, in part, through video routines that went viral on social media: here is Victor muddling through an awkward blind date, or riffing on the contents of a hardware store. Some of the funnier scenes in “Sorry, Baby” suggest a refinement—but also an audacious retooling—of the same offbeat rhythms: here is Agnes dressing down an insensitive doctor the day after her assault, or, in a morally reflective scene, carefully explaining to a court why she might not qualify for jury duty. Agnes has a gawky, floppy-haired beauty, a gently appraising stare, quizzically arching eyebrows, and a tendency to listen with her mouth half open, as if in anticipation of a punch line that will take her, and us, by surprise. She isn’t above making light of her trauma, but notice how she responds even to good news—like Lydie’s announcement that she’s pregnant—with a quick joke; she takes the piss out of life’s highs as well as its lows. She’s a true original, and so is “Sorry, Baby”: in structuring itself around the onset and aftermath of a monstrous betrayal, this quietly heroic movie refuses to let its heroine be defined by the same. ♦