Trapped in a Video Game with “Free Guy”

The hero of “Free Guy” is a guy named Guy (Ryan Reynolds). He has a best buddy named Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), and they live in a city named Free City. What, however, is the nature of their liberty? Guy wakes up every morning, dons an identical blue shirt, buys a cup of coffee, and goes to a bank, where he works as a teller. His customary greeting is “Don’t have a good day. Have a great day!” What is revealed to us before too long—though to Guy only gradually, as the film proceeds—is that he is not a real person but a non-player character, or N.P.C., in a video game. His happiness is delusional, and his agency nonexistent. Man is born free, but everywhere he is in pixels.

Each generation finds a new way to dramatize the enchained. Those who toil in the netherworld, in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927), are seen en masse, trudging with leaden gait toward their appointed tasks—a slog recalled at the start of Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” (1968), as the ranks of orphans descend to their daily gruel. No such gloom for Shawn Levy, the director of “Free Guy.” These days, we want our downers to feel like uppers; for Guy, as for the protagonist of “The Lego Movie” (2014), the quotidian is a spree. Guy’s grin is nailed on from the instant he sits up in bed, and it rarely slips, even when he strolls down the street through a salvo of explosions, or when the bank is raided, on a regular basis, by weapon-brandishing goons. To him, the mayhem is part of the scenery.

Now and then, we pull back and view this busy world from the outside. The game that Guy inhabits, also named Free City, is the creation of a company called Soonami Studios, and it’s a hit. We glimpse ordinary humans playing it (or, in the case of one dorky fellow, trying to play it while his mother vacuums); these are the gentle souls, presumably reared on Grand Theft Auto, who orchestrate the car chases and the gunfights that infest the screen. We also meet those who designed the game—people like Keys (Joe Keery) and his friend Millie (Jodie Comer), who believe that their contribution to Free City was pinched and used, without acknowledgment, by Antwan (Taika Waititi), the overbearing boss of the corporation. You could argue that the true subject of “Free Guy” is complex intellectual-property theft. For some reason, this is not mentioned on the poster.

Millie is something else. That is to say, she is not merely herself, in the mortal sphere, but also a spunky digital avatar, Molotov Girl, within the domain of Free City. Here comes the plot. Walking along, Guy sees Molotov Girl, and the sight of her propels him into consciousness. (How this can possibly occur is kind of explained. Depending on whom you listen to, Guy is either “an algorithm who thinks he’s alive” or “the first real artificial intelligence.”) In practical terms, he shifts from background to foreground; the cog in the machine becomes the core of its narrative energy—like Chaplin in “Modern Times” (1936), although Reynolds, in his unfailing and near-creepy bonhomie, is closer to Harold Lloyd. Guy starts taking decisions and making things happen, much to the delight of Free City’s fans, who give him the sobriquet Blue Shirt Guy, and to the fury of Antwan, who wants the upstart wiped.

“Free Guy” is exhausting to behold. It’s a battle of wits between gags and special effects, with neither party willing to give ground. There’s never a dull moment, the obvious risk being that, amid this pullulation of detail, there will be no interesting moments, either—the fate that has encumbered most of the films that adopt video games as a template. Even Spielberg, in “Ready Player One” (2018), was confounded by the ravenous needs of the genre. Yet Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

The root of that charm is easily found. Once you scrape away the techno-clutter, you uncover one of the oldest of Hollywood tropes—that of the nobody who bucks the system and ends up changing it for the better. What would Frank Capra, who brought that fantasy to slightly disturbing perfection, in films like “Meet John Doe” (1941), make of “Free Guy” if he were able to watch it? Might he hear the distant echo of his own endeavors, or would he simply sit there deafened and aghast?

What he would warm to, I reckon, is the presence of Jodie Comer. After all, she plays two characters, Millie and Molotov Girl, each of whom has somebody in love with her. (Keys, unsurprisingly, has a thing for the former.) The result is that we get a double helping of the resourceful, the unflustered, and the amusingly dry; when Molotov Girl realizes that Guy is a genuine innocent, every bit as chipper as he appears to be, she says, “I sometimes forget that not everyone you meet here is a sociopathic man-child.” High praise indeed! It is not just inveterate gamers who are torn between the earthly and the imagined. With Comer, you get the best of both worlds.

If you are a New Yorker with catholic appetites and a long memory, it may well be that your life was shaped by Donald S. Rugoff, though his name will ring no bells. Back in the day, whenever you took your seat at a movie theatre like the Plaza, the Paris, the Beekman, or the Sutton, you were entering the realm of Rugoff. He was “probably the greatest distributor of independent and art films in the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies.” Such is the opinion of Ira Deutchman, who has now backed up his conviction by making a documentary, “Searching for Mr. Rugoff.”

The search is enhanced by the fact that so many people who knew Rugoff are still around to bear witness. Few of them remember him fondly, but boy, do they remember him. In person, he resembled a schlubby Jean-Paul Sartre; in his aesthetic and commercial judgments, he was daring and astute, despite his habit of falling fast asleep during screenings. (How I dream of developing that knack.) Rugoff may have introduced U.S. audiences to the painfully delicate “Elvira Madigan” (1967), but he also had his minions trot around Manhattan knocking coconuts together, to mimic the clop of a horse and thereby advertise “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975). If only Rugoff hadn’t lost control of the business before the advent of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian” (1979). This was a man whose mother, when pregnant with him, apparently believed that she was bearing the Messiah in her womb.

But he wasn’t the Messiah. He was a very busy boy. We hear that Rugoff had “exquisite taste”; that he flew first class and dined at fancy restaurants; and that, as likely as not, he had dribbles of mustard on his shirt. His first wife, Evangeline Peterson, confirms that he proposed to her after thinking the matter over in the toilet. (Later, post-divorce, he begged her to accompany him to Sweden for a viewing of Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage.” That’s love.) At work, his firings were almost as impetuous as his hirings, and his employees describe him as an ogre and a tyrant. On the other hand, you might easily walk into Rugoff ’s office and find François Truffaut there. Some tyrannies are worth enduring.

“Searching for Mr. Rugoff ” is an entertaining and instructive jaunt, and it bristles with small shocks—a glance at a page from Variety, say, dated August 12, 1970. There we read that “Chisum,” starring John Wayne, ranked third on the list of top-grossing releases for the previous week. Second was “Patton,” with George C. Scott. The list was headed by “Z,” directed by the Greek-born Costa-Gavras, and inspired by the murder of a left-wing politician. The movie, which had won Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, four months earlier, and had even been nominated for Best Picture, is said to have found favor with the Black Panthers. I doubt that Wayne was so impressed. Needless to say, “Z” had been picked up by Rugoff, whose antennae quivered at any hint of provocation. Hence, in the same year, his enthusiasm for “Gimme Shelter,” with the Rolling Stones, and the Warhol-flavored “Trash.”

So is this new documentary a sad spectacle, paying tribute, as it does, to a gone and golden age? Yes, when we see old photographs of Cinema I and II, Rugoff’s stronghold of late-modern style, and learn that, however sloppy in himself, he would not condone a stray candy wrapper on the floor. The idea that moviegoing might once have been actively hip sounds quaint to the point of myth; today, in the larger venues, the best that you can hope for is to leave without treading on a Twizzler. Still, the uplifting news is that Deutchman’s film will screen at the Paris, the most graceful of Rugoff’s theatres, which has recently opened afresh. Other films, redolent of the period that he helped define, will play there in the days and weeks that follow—“Cousin Cousine” (1976), “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs” (1978), and, for an authentic savor of the mid-seventies, “Emmanuelle.” How would Rugoff, the showman connoisseur, have promoted that? Don’t ask. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Rugoff ’s relation to “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.”