Author Lynn Painter still can’t quite believe her own life.

Fifteen years of rejection letters trying to land a literary agent has given way to a run that reads like one of her own plots: a Sony adaptation of her breakout YA novel Better Than the Movies now in production, a set visit with her family watching actors bring her characters to life, a casting announcement for the next adaptation of her book and a growing shelf of romance titles that stretch from teen rom-coms to adult fiction.

“Every single day, there’s something,” Painter tells The Hollywood Reporter. “I get an email from Sony like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna announce the cast today,’ and I’m like, what? Every day in my life right now is me just going, ‘What?’ It’s the greatest thing ever.”

Moments before the author’s chat with THR, the casting for Sony’s film adaptation of her novel Fake Skating was announced to be Amélie Hoeferle and Graham Campbell. Josh Boone is directing from a script penned by Morgan Lehmann and Victoria Bata and revised by Boone and his writing partner Knate Lee.

Painter says she saw Hoeferle and Campbell’s chemistry reads and couldn’t be happier with the decision. She recalls Boon sending her a video of the two actors with the author immediately thinking, “This could be magic.”

As the adaptation for Fake Skating is making leeway, Painter’s other adaptation Better Than the Movies is already filming with Julia Hart directing and David Iacono and Beatrice Kitsos starring. The author says she visited the set just last week. Seeing her debut novel come to life has been a “surreal” experience for the author who is still trying to comprehend it’s even happening in the first place.

“I don’t know anything about the movie industry, or I didn’t, [but] I’m learning really quickly,” she says. The author may not be steering the adaptation herself, but credits the team of creatives for instilling a genuine back-and-forth collaboration, given that it was readers, not studios, she says, who first found her characters Wes, Liz, Dani and Alec.

Hart and producer Jordan Horowitz, who also wrote the Better Than the Movies script, kept a line open throughout the writing process, regularly texting Painter to check whether specific scenes matched her original intent. “They’re very protective of the fact that readers found them first,” Painter says, adding that she trusts the filmmakers to hear her out if something felt off — though so far, nothing has: “They also are so good at what they do. … It’s kind of a perfect world.”

She also found solace knowing she and Hart were aligned from their very first conversation, largely because Hart immediately zeroed in on what Painter sees as the real engine of the book: Liz’s relationship with her mother and her coming-of-age arc, rather than the will-they-won’t-they romance alone.

Alejandro González Iñárritu and Tom Cruise were made for each other, if no one else. One is a cinematic daredevil whose films are fueled by the tension between ego and mortality — a mad virtuoso obsessed with staging elaborate stunts that externalize his inner being into the stuff of outsized spectacle, and do so with a kamikaze effortfulness so extreme that even (or especially) their most grandiose work can make it seem like the person behind them is hiding from reality instead of rendering it larger than life. The other is Tom Cruise.

By different means, toward different ends, both men have consistently risked their creative and/or actual lives as they’ve reckoned with the limits of what they can accomplish with a movie camera. Through projects like “Birdman,” “Bardo,” and the “Mission: Impossible” sequels, both men have dedicated the most recent stretch of their careers to blurring the line between the art and the artist. Not as a bid to elide some kind of moral reckoning (easy as it is to see Cruise’s ascension into “The Savior of Movies” as a calculated rebrand), but rather as an effort to explore — or transcend — the relationship between reality and the stories that people choose to tell about themselves.

In that light, I suppose it was only a matter of time before Iñárritu and Cruise finally combined their powers/personas to make the ultimate movie about self-delusion. And so we arrive at “Digger,” a raw and modest little movie that has no ambition beyond poking some fun at the absurdity of its own existence.

Just kidding. LOL. ROTFL, even. The third chapter in a loose trilogy of postmodern films examining the value of creativity at a time when reality has become stranger than fiction, “Digger” is a mega-budget “Dr. Strangelove” riff so detached from human truth that its most believable character is a one-eyed animatronic cat named Maggie — a VistaVision satire so high-concept that it would be more accurate to measure its running time in altitude than minutes.

Like “Birdman” and “Bardo” before it, Iñárritu’s biggest swing (and most endearing folly) self-reflexively hinges upon the various ways that people make sense of living in a world that has abandoned its logic. An $125 million+ Brechtian funhouse that’s been constructed with the craft of a basilica and the obviousness of a bad “SNL” cold open, “Digger” uses its ostensible premise — a trillionaire oil tycoon who doesn’t give a shit about climate change triggers an ecological catastrophe with his name all over it — to plumb the myopia that’s defined the 21st century, and might also be required to survive it.

To say that Iñárritu’s characteristically belabored script (co-written by Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolás Giacobone) reinvents itself at the end of its first and second acts would be the kind of understatement that the “Babel” director has never been capable of, but it’s safe to say that “Digger” sustains a clear, meta-textual interest in its central idea: The world is deteriorating faster than our collective imagination can keep up. They say that comedy is tragedy plus time, and this is a film that fracks that equation for every molecule of hot air that it can — a film that laughs at our compulsion to narrativize the past at the same time as it awes at our failure to appreciate how fucked things have gotten in the present.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Joan Didion wrote; Iñárritu counters that we might just kill ourselves in the process. With “Digger,” he’s finally identified self-delusion as the world’s most valuable resource.

What else can I say about this movie without revealing its secrets? Tom Cruise is Digger, that much I can tell you. Digger Rockwell, to be precise. Equal parts Les Grossman, Daniel Plainview, and Foghorn Leghorn, Digger is basically a pair of whiskey-soaked finger-guns made flesh, and Cruise — ensconced inside Kazu Hiro’s seamless latex prosthetics, which include wrinkly jowls and a serious paunch — inhabits the guy with the same physical commitment that made Ethan Hunt into such a living spectacle. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an actor require so many decrepit flourishes just to play a character who’s roughly his same age, but his performance works as intended even when you bump against the Tom Cruise of it all, and there’s no denying the thrill of watching him apply his signature intensity to a role as strange as this one.

Like most people who are rich enough to do so, Digger lives in a cloistered world of his own design, to the point that his Xanadu-like mansion has framed paintings for windows, his antler-horned mirrors reflect his image to infinity, and world leaders come to him so that he doesn’t have to leave the house. His cat Maggie is a 30-year-old Khao Manee who looks as if she’s been rotting in his lap for the better part of a decade, but Digger refuses to accept the fact that she might die one day, even though it seems like she already has.

Digger likewise refuses to accept that any harm might come from the “small” crack his crew has caused in the Arctic ice shelf, but that changes — or at least threatens to — after a methane fireball erupts from the ground, kills everyone at the outpost, and sends a “Manhattan-sized” chunk of Greenland speeding toward Europe (the constantly changing comps used to describe the iceberg’s girth is one of this movie’s only digestible jokes). The next thing we know, the rectal cancer-stricken President of the United States — a red-cheeked John Goodman, making his performance in “Barton Fink” seem like a model of restraint — has set up an impromptu SCIF in Digger’s war room, and a small army of Pete Hegseth caricatures (along with a misused Michael Stuhlbarg as the vice president) have gathered to discuss nuking the mass with as little personal fallout as possible. If they could enter the launch codes with their dicks, they would.

The Major T.J. “King” Kong” vibes are strong, even if these scenes are scripted with a political acuity that cleaves closer to Ed Sheeran than Terry George. (The movie later doubles back to insist that these scenes are meant to be unfunny, a claim that would carry more weight if the scenes were anything else on purpose instead.) Riz Ahmed is there, entombed in his role as a frazzled scientific advisor who recognizes the severity of the situation. Sandra Hüller occasionally sneers in from the sidelines as well, the “Toni Erdmann” legend acquitting herself well in the underwritten role of Digger’s half-sister, in part because the movie invites her to act above it all — it’s not her most demanding work.

Eventually, after a patience-thinning 30 minutes that’s only enlivened by the simple slapstick of people tripping over Digger’s shovel, the fuller scope of Iñárritu’s vision is revealed, and the movie graduates from the soft targets of its opening act (e.g. environmental pillaging, apocalyptic chauvinism, god-king strongmen) to the more abstract and self-involved concerns I alluded to above: most of all the extent to which narrative has become the prevailing force in our world, both individually and on a global scale. “Digger” opens up a new plot thread in its second act — one that it visits far too briefly, and that I missed every time the movie returned to the dead-end story of its eponymous tycoon, who basically spends the rest of his screentime doing damage control for his character in lieu of being able to mitigate the disaster he’s caused.

As with every time that “Digger” heightens its concept even further into the stratosphere, this big reveal — which is neither the last of its kind, nor the most satisfying — is accompanied by a strange whiff of self-deprecation; whenever Iñárritu’s opus expands its scope, it does so in a way that knowingly calls attention to the disconnect between the film’s exertion and its lack of impact. Dennis Gassner’s extraordinary production design, Emmanuel Lubezki’s Bruegel-esque cinematography, Cosmo Sheldrake’s off-kilter music (a throwback to the days when every Kaufman-like comedy required a Jon Brion score), and the rest of the impeccable craftwork are all in service to a movie that constantly questions its own value in the face of its story’s extinction-level events.

The beauty of the craftwork allows those questions the chance to feel sincere instead of self-serving, but — and please stop me if you’ve heard this one before — Iñárritu’s grandiosity makes it impossible for him to pose them on a human scale. The ideas are seldom the problem in his films. On the contrary, the issue once again is that his spectacle-driven simulacra is rooted in the lies we tell ourselves rather than the truths we hope to bury underneath them, and so his hyper-conceptual comedies invariably seem as if they’re built on the watery quicksand of a mixed metaphor.

True to form, “Digger” is a hat on a hat on a hat on a hat, with Iñárritu frantically hoping to pile them tall enough that they stand on their own without tipping over. That anxiety is endemic to the comedy in his films, which has never been more exasperating than it is here. As in “Birdman,” Iñárritu tries to combine the time signature of a “New Yorker” cartoon with the syncopation of a nervous breakdown (or at least a Howard Hawks movie), and the whole movie feels out of tune as a result. To paraphrase the great Kyle Cooke, “Digger” should be fun, but it’s not even funny, and the sweaty clumsiness of its punchlines and sight gags only serve to make the script’s galaxy-brained satire feel more like the stuff of an IMAX-sized JibJab cartoon.

Iñárritu unsurprisingly fares better when he trades slapstick for Hieronymous Bosch-like surrealism during the middle portion of “Digger,” which more fully embraces the whole Roy Andersson on steroids aesthetic of a pallid movie in which everyone looks as ashen and half-dead as Digger’s cat. These sequences are no less contrived than the rest of this malformed blockbuster, but their growing emphasis on performativeness helps to paint a target that Iñárritu actually knows how to hit.

“Digger” peaks with a purgatorial scene in which Cruise saunters through a crowded assembly hall of the damned and monologues — for something like 10 straight minutes — about the disconnect between our hatred toward oligarchs like him, and our dependence they afford the masses to “bask in the comfort of [our] unremarkable lives.” Not only is it the closest we’ll ever come to seeing America’s definitive movie star do Broadway, but it also resonates with the meta-narrative of Cruise’s screen career. The Digger Rockwell of Planet Hollywood, Cruise was (partially) to blame for the bigger is better culture that led us to a place where a single blockbuster miscalculation could threaten the entire studio system. And like the character he plays here, Cruise has credibly made the case that he’s the only person capable of digging us out of that mess.

If “Digger” bombs as hard as I fear it will, it may prove to be a more damning portrait of self-delusion than Iñárritu ever intended.

Then again, the reason why “Digger” is a nobler and more rewarding failure than “Birdman” or “Bardo” is because it doesn’t have to pretend that Digger Rockwell is a real person. He’s a living cartoon who’s exempted from the human foundation that was missing from those earlier films, and — for all of this movie’s psych-outs and detours — that allows Iñárritu to address his existential crises with a greater directness and degree of relatability. You wouldn’t believe where “Digger” goes even if I spelled it out with full spoilers, but its darkly (and at least somewhat inadvertently) hilarious final shot delivers on the essence of a future-facing movie about how readily we have to normalize the absurdity of the present in order to endure it — a movie that extrapolates a wry and all too real vision of mass psychosis from the self-delusion of its own making.

Grade: C+

Warner Bros. will release “Digger” in theaters on Friday, October 2.

At last, a climate crisis satire so smug and bombastic it makes Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up seem almost innocuous. Digger is basically what happens when you put two outsize egos together with nobody holding the reins to keep their most self-indulgent impulses in check. Piloted by a spectacularly obnoxious Tom Cruise, who evidently spent hours in the makeup chair each day to look his age, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s wannabe Dr. Strangelove is a heavy-handed cataclysm scenario built around the blunt point that any attempt to halt global warming this late in the game is pure political theater.

It’s a movie that sets out to be divisive, and no doubt many will applaud its extravagant display of what passes for audaciousness and originality. But put me in the camp of those who most definitely did not dig it. Though Iñárritu mined a fertile vein of sardonic humor in 2014’s Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), comedy has never been this grandiose director’s forte. His eighth feature is so meta that you watch in excruciating weariness as it disappears up its own ass and then realize to your dismay that there’s another eardrum-shattering hour left to endure.

I was reminded of colossal misfires like Damien Chazelle’s Babylon and David O. Russell’s Amsterdam, bloated movies by directors so drunk on their exalted reputations they forgot there was an audience to consider.

Digger epitomizes the difference between big swing and hubristic folly more than any film since Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, another wildly ambitious bid to skewer the chaos of contemporary reality. But Coppola’s film, irrespective of its fatal flaws and excesses, at least meant something in the context of his career. It also tempered its despair for humanity with illuminating glimmers of hope.

There’s no such relief in Iñárritu’s film, which boils down to, “Look at the hopeless mess we’re stuck in, hahaha! All we have left is great subversive art.” That last part is debatable.

Coming after the handsomely crafted but thematically overstuffed existential navel-gazing of the 2022 Netflix feature Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, which was Iñárritu’s answer to Fellini’s Otto e mezzo, Digger furthers the impression that the director is now primarily interested in making films about his own genius for mythmaking, as both an artist and a truth-teller pulling away the gauze to expose the alarming quagmire of our 21st century world. Unless that anxiety is not already entrenched in your recurring thoughts — and if not, wake up — it’s unlikely this film has much to tell you.

In a performance that melds his cocky motivational speaker from Magnolia with his belligerent, prosthetics-clad studio executive from Tropic Thunder, Cruise plays powerful oil baron Digger Rockwell, an overbearing boor named for the shovel with which his granddaddy dug his way to a family fortune. He has the entire U.S. government in his pocket, including President Compson (John Goodman), another bellowing windbag, and enough clout to get around pesky regulations and environmental concerns.

For some reason that has zero bearing on the plot, Digger loves his mangy cat and is determined to keep the ailing creature, half-blind and incontinent, alive at any cost. The shoddy feline puppet is one of the first clues that the world of Digger’s palatial mansion — stuffed with hunting trophies and surrounded by sweeping landscapes — might not be exactly what it seems. The curtain rising on a proscenium stage is another, as is a lingering shot of a poster for Cassavetes’ Opening Night, held for so long I might have involuntarily groaned.

But before the big reveal intended to shift our perspective on everything we have seen, including the strident overacting, Cruise’s Digger swaggers from room to room barking orders in his Texas twang, his paunchy silicone dad bod adorned with cowboy boots, 10-gallon hats and bolo ties. Iñárritu seems to think this visual alone is funny, but that would require getting past the persistently dull and witless writing. Not to mention that Cruise’s performance starts at an abrasive 11, leaving him nowhere to go.

Digger is so used to being cocooned among yes men that he’s almost affronted when his head of environmental security (Danny Kirrane) gets through on a video call from the Arctic oil field where the Rockwell workforce has been pumping 9,000 barrels a day, with nine months remaining on the company’s lease.

The oil tycoon does not like to be told anything he doesn’t want to hear, so he’s more annoyed than concerned when informed that methane gas bubbling up from the ocean floor as a result of his drilling operations has caused a rapidly expanding crack in a glacial ice bed, threatening its stability.

When an explosion is reported at the drilling site, Digger is more worried about the damage to the oil rig than he is the human casualties or the massive dislodged ice shelf headed for Europe, where scientists predict its impact will trigger a tsunami and displace millions of people. That potential disaster of course is something Digger and his father before him have known about for decades (“CO2 is just the fuse, methane is the bomb”) but have managed to hush up thanks to bribes and backroom government deals.

It’s hard to find the humor in all this with a current administration so gung-ho in its “Drill, baby, drill!” recklessness, having neutered the EPA and scrapped regulatory oversight for fossil fuel extraction. But being unfunny is less Digger’s problem than a story that ties itself in knots trying to be clever, as a completely unconvincing big twist alters the picture and opens a window to a grim future. It also means that many of the cast from a certain point on are effectively playing dual roles, not that there’s much virtuosity to admire.

Scenes of laissez-faire politics leave more of a sour taste than a smile — notably when Digger summons President Compson and his senior cabinet to his home for a meeting in which he emphasizes the need to get out in front of the story and control the narrative, using the public’s panic to their advantage.

Hardass Defense Secretary Colonel Fitzgerald (Robert John Burke, basically playing George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove) just wants to bomb the runaway iceberg. But one of the few voices of reason, scientist Ganesh (Riz Ahmed, also one of the few performances allowed any nuance), speaks up to explain how that would set off a whole new chain of disasters, refusing to sugarcoat the awful truth for the public.

The movie’s best scene, which gives Cruise an opportunity to flex his acting muscles while being simultaneously combative and charming in Digger’s folksy manner, has him addressing the European Parliament in an assembly hall that evokes the Roman Senate. By owning the global crisis unleashed by oil billionaires and a complicit government, Digger causes an uproar. But he hurls the politicians’ anger right back at them, declaring that, “Oil is the mother’s milk of Earth,” and calling the current predicament the price of doing business with a commodity that all of them want.

None of this ever accumulates much weight, however, since the conflicts are all dulled by the one-note absurdity of the farcical plotting. Even the few characters willing to stand up to Digger, like his truculent younger sister Emma (a very shouty Sandra Hüller, wasted), his level-headed assistant Lina (Emma D’Arcy) and Vice President Fryman (Michael Stuhlbarg), are drowned out in all the racket. Jesse Plemons plays a global intel company owner with a behind-the-scenes role, but the actor remains stuck on the sidelines.

Considering the grim future scenario these remarkably unpleasant two hours dump on us, and the exhausting effect of all its aggressive auteurist grandstanding — blame Iñárritu and his co-writers, not Cruise — Digger ultimately just prompts a worn-down shrug. Shot in VistaVision and reuniting the director with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, it looks suitably big and imposing but is less interesting for its visual textures than for Dennis Gassner and Richard Johnson’s elaborate production design.

The IMAX Countdown that precedes the film reads: “Watch a movie or be a part of one.” It’s difficult to imagine mainstream audiences ever wanting to be a part of this bludgeoning ordeal.