In Inglourious Basterds (2009), Quentin Tarantino set the action in an alternate past, one where the events of World War II play out rather differently, and he does the same trick in the altogether better Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which, as the title suggests, plays as a tinsel town fairy tale that rewrites the tragic events of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders, giving Hollywood the happy ending to the sixties that the Manson Family denied it. It isn’t a film about the most famous victim, Sharon Tate, though she appears throughout the film, but it sits alongside a spate of films that tried to reimagine the events at Cielo Drive around the same time – Wolves at the Door (2016), the Netflix series Mindhunter (2017-2019), American Horror Story (2011-), Charlie Says (2018) and The Haunting of Sharon Tate (2019).

The real star of the film is actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), former star of 1950s TV Western Bounty Law, who is beginning to worry that his career is on the skids. His agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino) advises him to go to Italy to make Spaghetti Westerns but Dalton believes them to be beneath him. Dalton’s best friend is his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) who some believe murdered his wife, rumours that have stalled his career, and Dalton’s next door neighbours are Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and her husband Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha). The bulk of the film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this alternative Los Angeles in 1969 – Tate visits the cinema to see herself in The Wrecking Crew (1968) and is delighted by the audience’s response; Dalton finds work as the villain in a pilot for TV western Lancer (1968-1970) but struggles to remember his lines and suffers a breakdown; Booth picks up hitchhiker, Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) who takes him to the Spahn Movie Ranch where Bounty Law was filmed and introduces him to some of her hippy friends who become aggressive when he insists on seeing the owner, George Spahn (Bruce Dern) who is being cared for by a young woman named Squeaky (Dakota Fanning); Dalton relents and agrees to appear in appear in Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Ringo del Nebraska/Nebraska Jim (1966), spending six months in Italy and marrying starlet Francesca Capucci (Lorenza Izzo); and almost fall victim to the “Family” of Charles Manson (Damon Herriman), the hippies at the Spahn Ranch, when Tex (Austin Butler), Sadie (Mikey Madison), Katie (Madison Beaty), and Flowerchild (Maya Hawke) decide to target Dalton instead of Tate and her friends.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood has all the quirks and tics that we’ve come to expect from Tarantino – a large, expertly chosen cast all performing beautifully; a time skipping narrative that takes in montage, flashbacks, memories and other devices to flesh out QT’s imagined world on 1969; the director’s apparent foot fetishism; blasts of period-appropriate music; and a tendency to lift bits and pieces from the old film and television that he loves so much which, in the past, has sometimes felt like he was simply piecing together quilts made from other people’s works but which here feels very loving. And it’s infectious. It’s hard not to get swept up in the myriad film references and in-jokes and one wonders how audiences who weren’t dyed in the wool film nerds handled it all. Were mainstream, multiplex audiences that au fait with Sergio Corbucci in 2019 or did they just assume that he was made up? It also relies on the audience being au fait with the Manson family and its crimes as Tarantino is no mood to rehash the whole sordid back story yet again.

But one feels that Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood isn’t a film for them. It’s a film buff’s paradise, every scene crammed with audio visual references, from radio trailers to familiar titles on billboards. Den of Geek compiled a huge list of the “easter eggs” in the film, some of which will be obvious, others more obscure and some only becoming evident after multiple viewings. There are also spot on recreations of 50s TV westerns (listen out for a Wilhelm scream), Dalton being (not terribly convincingly) inserted into The Great Escape (1963) in the Steve McQueen role and The F.B.I. (1965-1974) episode All the Streets Are Silent (1965) replacing Burt Reynolds and a charming scene where a visibly elated Tate watches herself in The Wrecking Crew and revels in the warm reception it gets from an audience oblivious to its co-star in their midst. The recreation of this alternative 1969 is breathtaking. Digital effects are used to recreate long-gone Los Angeles landmarks and the work of production designer Barbara Ling, costume designer Arianne Phillips and a large team of make-up and hair artists is top notch. It feels real, lived in, a glimpse of a past that both existed and didn’t all at the same time.

One moment caused some small ruckus on the internet where, to surely no-one’s great surprise, it was almost entirely misunderstood. Booth relates a fanciful tale, shown in flashback, of how he took on Bruce Lee in a parking lot and administered the kung fu legend a good thrashing. Lee fans were up in arms, accusing Tarantino of everything from disrespecting Lee to outright racism. But the point is that we’re seeing this whole thing from Booth’s perspective, and he’s already proven himself to be a less than reliable narrator. It’s his fantasy of how the encounter went – note that the crowd initially watching the fight disappear mid-shot, removing from his version of the story the only people capable of corroborating his account. The resulting future was sufficient for the Chin Film Administration to demand cuts to the scene, changes that Tarantino was unwilling to make resulting the films Chinese release being cancelled.

One of Tarantino’s greatest talents in drawing out excellent performances from his large and eclectic casts and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is no exception. There was some criticism that Robbie’s version of Tate had very little to say, but Tarantino explained that he wanted viewers to just spend time with her as she went about her life, telling journalist Mike Fleming Jr of Deadline Hollywood that “I thought it would both be touching and pleasurable and also sad and melancholy to just spend a little time with [Tate], just existing… I wanted you to see Sharon a lot.” He gets great performances from his two male leads and the relationship between Dalton and Booth is a fascinating one. The former is wallowing in self-pity, partly stuck in the past and fearful of his future while the latter is developing, slowly but surely, changing and growing. Without these sorts of character nuance and the fine performances bringing them so vividly to life, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood would just be a beautiful recreation. With these performances, it’s a living, breathing beautiful recreation.

It’s still a self-indulgent film, perhaps the most irksome of Tarantino’s traits and there are moments in the middle where flabbiness sets in. And yes, it’s episodic but overall, it’s a triumph, a huge amount of fun and its climax leaves just enough doubt about what’s happening (are we seeing what’s really happening in this alternate history or is it just the drug-addled memories/fantasies of Booth (who we know is prone to self-mythologising) under the influence of his LSD cigarette – it certainly explains his apparent superhuman strength during the climactic home invasion. It also provides the closest we get in the film to Tarantino making some sort of social comment, when a deranged Sadie confronts Booth telling him “We kill the people who taught us how to kill.” But this isn’t a message film. It’s a love letter to a bygone Hollywood and in that respect it’s terrific, Tarantino’s most wholly enjoyable film for years.