Ford v Ferrari is such a well-made, entertaining movie it made me do what I thought I’d never do, root for corporate America. More specifically, it made me root for the Ford Motor Company, a giant multinational corporation founded by a union-busting Nazi, against Ferrari, a posh Italian microbrand. It did so in two ways. First of all, director James Mangold had an enormous budget, $97.6 million dollars if Wikipedia is to believed. Second, Ford v Ferrari revives the tried and true 1980s narrative of the idea of a conflict between the all American “maverick” against the stodgy corporate douchebag. It allows us to have our cake and eat it too, to be a “rebel” while remaining inside corporate America, to stick it to the man, even as we’re cashing the man’s fat, corporate paychecks.

Ford v Ferrari is in fact so good, I’d like to see a whole series of movies where all American corporate mavericks crush snooty Eurotrash. How about Budweiser v Weihenstephaner Hefe Weissbier? Microsoft v openSuse? Boeing v Airbus? The Marvel Cinematic Universe v Jean Luc Godard? The only problem is nothing is made in the United States anymore. The heroes would all have to be Chinese, and the villains Armani clad American douchebros with lofts in Tribeca. Indeed, part of the reason Ford v Ferrari has so much appeal is the way it plays on our nostalgia for the days when the United States produced anything beyond weapons, propaganda and “crippling sanctions” on countries with governments we don’t like. When Henry Ford II directs Matt Damon’s Carroll Shelby to look out of the window at the Willow Run Manufacturing Complex in the not yet deindustrialized Detroit and proudly states that “Roosevelt didn’t beat Hitler, my father did,” it made me so wistfully nostalgic for the America I never really got to see that it almost let me forget that Henry Ford Sr. was an actual Nazi.

If the Marvel Cinematic Universe is propaganda for Washington DC and the American military industrial complex then Ford v Ferrari is propaganda for an America that actually had a private sector. The best scenes in Ford v Ferrari are the racing scenes, which, as far as I can tell, didn’t use any CGI. $97.6 million dollars can buy a lot of cars, sets, and space for on location shoots. Having recently binge watched all of the Chris Evans Captain America movies, I can say without any hesitation that real stunt drivers who know what they’re doing and natural lighting are always more entertaining  than a bank of computer nerds in a loft somewhere in downtown LA running Autodesk Maya, Pixar Renderman for Maya. Autodesk SoftImage XSI. Unlike the heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the heroes of Ford v Ferrari are regular 40-year-old dude bros who not only have high blood pressure but could actually die. The opening of the final sequence at 24 Hours of Le Mans, with drivers at the starting line rushing for their cars then getting into an apocalyptic multi-car accident before the race has hardly even begun, is so good it made me wonder why Hollywood doesn’t stage live-action NASCAR more often.

In other words, the real Captain America is not Steve Rogers, but Ken Miles, and he’s not even American. He’s British, a 45-year-old World War II hero from Birmingham with a Brummie accent and a 40-year-old but still hot wife played by the Irish ex-supermodel Caitriona Balfe. Miles, played by Christian Bale, who I first saw in the late 1980s movie Empire of the Sun shouting “Cadillac of the skies horsepower” at two P-51s strafing Japanese positions in Shanghai, is, like most Americans, at least in our imagination, an individualist. When a Ford Motor Company, corporate douchebag played by Josh Lucas tells his son not to touch a car, Miles tells the corporate douchebag that the car is a piece of shit anyway. Hell, do fathers in real life actually stand up for their kids against their boss? Well, I’ve never seen it, but it’s a fantasy worth exploring. Of course the reason it’s a fantasy is that while Miles is a rugged individualist, he’s also a rugged individualist who likes to play with expensive toys, in this case race cars. How much ass kissing he’ll have to do is one of the themes the story explores.

But it’s Miles’s more rational and American alter-ego, the famous designer of American muscle cars Carroll Shelby played by Matt Damon, who does most of the ass-kissing anyway. Ford v Ferrari opens with Lee Iacocca, the Ford executive who would later go on in the 1980s to lead Chrysler and secure a massive corporate bailout from the Reagan Administration — do you think Obama invented corporate bailouts? — talking to his boss Henry Ford II about a new marketing strategy. It’s 1962 and the oldest Baby Boomers, born in 1945, are now starting to get drivers licenses. Sadly, he argues, Ford has lost its “cool.” Teenage and twentysomething dude bros don’t want to drive stodgy old cars designed for middle-age suburban dads. They want fast cars that will let them outrun the cops and get the chicks. Iacocca suggests that Ford buy out the posh Italian microbrand Ferrari — Enzo Ferrari has built the perfect car but his company is broke — and sponsor a driver in the 24 Hours of Le Mans race in France.

So Iacocca goes to Italy and attempts to close the deal, and yeah, I was rooting for a Ford Motor Company corporate douchebag attempting a hostile takeover of a classic, failing brand. Enzo Ferrari, however, is too smart for Lee Iacocca. While he pretends to consider Iacocca’s offer, he’s actually using Ford to court Fiat. Fiat gives Ferrari a better deal, Enzo insults Ford and his manhood. Ford insults Enzo and his ethnicity — and hilariously none of the film reviewers on YouTube can use the word “wop” without being demonetized — and the race is on. The drama then shifts over to Carroll Shelby’s dilemma. Of course a giant corporation like Ford has the money and resources to compete with a post Italian microbrand like Ferrari, but winning a race is more than just having a fast car. It’s about having the right driver, a man who knows how to push a machine to its limits without breaking it. That man, Shelby rightfully argues, is Ken Miles. Unfortunately for Shelby, however, Miles is too much of a maverick to be the star of a Ford Motor Company marketing campaign. They want him fired. Shelby knows that he’s vital to beating Ferrari but doesn’t know how to convince the corporate douchebags in the marketing department.

In the end, well there are two endings. In the first ending,  all American mavericks Carroll Shelby and Ken Miles beat Ferrari, but they don’t beat the corporate douchebags at Ford. Let’s just say the ending reminds me a bit of the New York Times refusing to endorse Bernie Sanders and instead endorsing multiple female candidates for woke points. The best man wins, but he doesn’t get the credit.  The second ending reminds me of a Springsteen song.

He rides headfirst into a hurricane and disappears into a point
And there’s nothin’ left but some blood where the body fell
That is, nothin’ left that you could sell
Just junk all across the horizon, a real highwayman’s farewell

It’s a bummer but a natural ending for a man who’s too much of a man to fit into this corporate hellhole we call the United States of America.