Michael Mann deserves more love than he’s gotten in his career. I think people forget he directed Heat, and somehow assume based on the casting it was Martin Scorsese, but it isn’t. He also did excellent work with The insider, and I even enjoyed his little seen Black Hat. Ferrari isn’t Heat, it isn’t perfect, but it also walked away with zero Oscar nominations. Did it deserve that fate?

For my blind fans, you can watch this film on demand right now. It’s from Neon,which had been sending their films to Hulu. The existence of audio description isn’t super consistent with neon, so grab it where you can. This is done by the team at Audio Eyes, written by sean Barnes, and narrated by Kyle Snyder. Having had to sit through Sony’s Gran Turismo without audio description, i truly appreciate a racing movie with audio description. It is utterly pointless if we can’t understand who is leading. You just hear the engines revving.

Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, with a different accent than he used in house Of Gucci (what is it about him that keeps him getting cast in Italian roles?), and he attacks it with a different energy. There’s a bit of a biopic feel here, as Enzo rises to fame, but oddly the film seems to focus a lot on lineage as a lot of the film surrounds his desire to have a child to pass his empire down to. It’s why there’s a dynamic between Enzo and his wife (played with fire from penelope Cruz), and his mistress (played so convincingly by Shailene Woodley, I swear it wasn’t her), and that really takes center stage.

Much like how Cooper is trying to reinvent the biopic with Maestro, Mann really isn’t interested in taking the obvious road here either. It seems like this is really the year of deconstructing biopics, from Maestro to Priscilla, everything seems to not want to tell a broad story in the same way last years Elvis was comfortable with. Ferrari is much more centered in a period of Enzo’s life, and focuses on relationships in the same way Cooper did with Leonard and Felicia in Maestro, or Sofia Coppola did with the complicated and problematic pairing of the Presley’s.

Driver’s performance seems somehow less impressive, perhaps because he sets such a high bar for himself. Driver has so many terrific roles under his belt, with standouts being Marriage Story and Black Klansman, and I think that is how he seems to have been lost this season. Add to that the impressive work done by his female co-stars, who really do some of their finest work, and the film almost becomes like Nine, telling the story from the perspective of the women in his life instead of Enzo. Yes, Enzo is the technical protagonist, but his engagements with Woodley and Cruz are whaat fires up Ferrari’s engine.

Ferrari isn’t the best film of the year, or the best film of anyone’s career, but it is a perfectly fine look at a complicated man who got far too wrapped up in not keeping it wrapped in order to sire an heir to his presumed dynasty. there is a rather horrific crash in this film that the team at Audio Eyes did a really good job describing, so I’d make sure to watch this with accessibility. Racing films without audio description really never get my engine started.

Final Grade: B