Spoiler Alert! If you haven't watched the F1 movie don't read this review!

As the headline says: If you haven't watched the F1 movie, don't read any further, come back when you have! Most Formula 1 drivers gathered in New York - pictured above - after the Canadian Grand Prix to attend the official premiere.

Kosinski, who last endeavoured to put moviegoers in the seat of a fighter jet in Top Gun: Maverick, has shifted to the open cockpits of Formula 1 with much the same affection, if not outright need, for speed. Much of the same team is back. Jerry Bruckheimer produces. Ehren Kruger, a co-writer on Maverick, takes sole credit here. Hans Zimmer, a co-composer previously, supplies the thumping score.

And again, our central figure is an older, high-flying cowboy plucked into an ultramodern, gas-guzzling conveyance to teach a younger generation about old school ingenuity and maybe the enduring appeal of denim.

But whereas Tom Cruise is a particularly forward-moving action star, Brad Pitt, who stars as the driving addicted Sonny Hayes in F1, has always been a more arrestingly poised presence. Think of the way he so calmly and half-interestedly faces off with Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood.

In the opening scene of F1, he’s sleeping in a van with headphones on when someone rouses him. He splashes water on his face and walks a few steps over to the Daytona oval, where he quickly enters his team’s car in the midst of a 24-hour race. Pitt goes from zero to 180 mph in a minute.

Sonny, a long-ago phenom who crashed out of Formula One decades earlier and has since been racing any vehicle, even a taxi, he can get behind the wheel of, is approached by an old friend, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), about joining his flagging F1 team, APX. Sonny turns him down at first, but of course he joins and F1 is off to the races.

The title sequence, exquisitely timed to the syncopated rhythms of Zimmer’s score, is a blistering introduction. The hotshot rookie driver Noah Pearce (Damson Idris) is just running a practice lap, but Kosinski, his camera adeptly moving in and out of the cockpit, uses the moment to plunge us into the high tech world of Formula 1, where every inch of the car is connected to digital sensors monitored by a watchful team.

That team includes technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) and Kaspar Molinski (Kim Bodnia), the team’s chief.

Verisimilitude is of obvious importance to the filmmakers, who bathe this very Formula One authorized film in all the sleek operations and globe-trotting spectacle of the sport.

That Apple, which produced the film, would even greenlight such a high priced summer movie about Formula 1 is a testament to the sport’s growing popularity, once quite niche in America, and the halo effects of both the Netflix series Formula 1: Drive to Survive and the much celebrated driver Lewis Hamilton, an executive producer on F1.

Whether the F1 movie pleases diehards, I’ll leave to more ardent followers of the circuit. But what I can say definitively is that Claudio Miranda knows how to shoot it. The cinematographer, who has shot all of Kosinski’s films as well as wonders like Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, brings Formula 1 to vivid, visceral life.

When F1 heads to the big races, Miranda is always simultaneously capturing the zooming cars from the asphalt while backgrounding them with the sweeping spectacle of a course like the UK’s fabled Silverstone Circuit.

There’s what I’d call just enough of one, though you might need to go to the photo finish to verify that. When Sonny shows up and rapidly turns one practice vehicle into toast, it’s clear that he’s going to be an agent of chaos at APX, a low-ranking team deep in debt and struggling to find a car that performs.

This gives Pitt a fine opportunity to flash his charisma, playing Sonny as an obsessive who refuses trophies and has no real interest in money either. The flashier, media-ready Noah watches Sonny's arrival with skepticism, and the two begin more as rivals than teammates.

Idris is up to the mano a mano challenge, but he’s limited by a role that ultimately revolves around and reduces to a young Black man learning a lesson in work ethic.

A relationship does develop, but F1 struggles to get its characters out of the starting blocks, keeping them close to the clichés they begin as. The actor who, more than anyone, keeps the momentum going is Condon, playing an aerodynamics specialist whose connection with Pitt’s Sonny is immediate. Just as she did between another pair of headstrong men in The Banshees of Inisherin, Condon is a rush of naturalism.

If there’s something preventing F1 from hitting full speed, it’s its insistence on having characters constantly voice Sonny’s motivations. The same holds true on the race course, where broadcast commentary narrates virtually every moment of the drama.

That may be a necessity for a sport where the crucial strategies of hot tires and pit stop timing aren’t quite household concepts. But the best car race movies, from Grand Prix to Senna to Ferrari, know when to rely on nothing but the roar of an engine.

F1 steers predictably to the finish line, cribbing here and there from sports dramas before it. (Tobias Menzies plays a board member with uncertain corporate goals.) When F1 does, finally, quiet down for one blissful moment, the movie almost literally soars. It’s not quite enough to forget all the high octane macho dramatics that precede it, but it’s enough to glimpse another road F1 might have taken.

F1, an Apple Studios production released by Warner Bros., is rated PG13 by the Motion Picture Association for strong language and action. Running time: 155 minutes. Three stars out of four.