Scarlett Johansson and Josh Brolin (Alison Rosa/Universal Studios)

The Coen brothers’ new comedy Hail, Caesar! may be superficially light fare, but in some ways this bauble is a summation of their career, a silly, wistful look at what may be their wildest dream: to have been filmmakers during Hollywood’s Golden Age.

The movie begins and almost ends with a confession. Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) has a lot of guilt. In a confessional, he opens up his soul to a priest who seems weary of the penitent’s self-flagellation. Eddie’s latest transgression: although he promised his wife he’s quit smoking, he snuck in a few cigs.

Eddie has an unusually high bar of integrity in an industry that may have no bar at all. He’s a studio fixer, trying to keep stars like Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) and DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) out of trouble to varying degrees of success. Moran, a star of highly choreographed swimming pictures that she clearly holds in contempt, is a tough-talking dame who needs to find somebody to play daddy to her upcoming blessed event. Whitlock, currently starring as a centurion in a prestigious biblical epic, is kidnapped by a pair of extras who take the passive leading man to a writer’s group who quickly convince him of the benefits of Communism.

Hail, Caesar! is a sly satire of an industry and a media climate where everything is fake. In the middle of this stands Eddie and Josh Brolin. As in Inherent Vice (and as Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewyn Davis), Brolin is a grounded presence in a movie generally populated by cartoon characters. The difference between the two is that in Davis’ world of folk music, authenticity was the goal; but in Mannix’s, artifice is the goal. Mannix tries to hold his ground and his faith in a world where lies and cartoons thrive.

Somewhere between truth and lies is Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich), a singing cowboy star who the studio has plucked for an incongruous chamber drama. An entertainer tapped for some kind of authentic cowboy innocence is moving up the Hollywood ladder, but this promotion tries to turn him into something he’s not.

Channing Tatum and Friends (Alison Rosa/Universal Pictures)

Then again, there’s is a sense of joy and discovery in changing voices, and the Coens revel in the opportunity to breeze through a series of Hollywood genres in miniature—some of them more successful than others. While their straight western seems overexposed, the musical western is one of the movie’s highlights, and I’m not even going to get into the strange arc of Channing Tatum’s character Burt Gurney.

Hail, Caesar! is super-meta, with multiple scenes that show what goes behind the scenes of a movie, from a director’s frustrated attempts to get a performance out of a struggling actor to a potentially dangerous editing room scenario that anyone who misses the days of 35mm film prints will drool over. The movie’s relationship with real life is fluid; Moran is a riff on Esther Williams, Gurney on Gene Kelly, and Eddie Mannix is based on a real Hollywood fixer. The real Mannix was no saint, though (one rumor has it that he had then-Superman George Reeves killed). The Coen’s Mannix is a kind of innocent gumshoe who tries to keep things right in the world.

After the sometimes amusing but ultimately bleak Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens have come back with a picture that finds the humanity in their caricatures, a joke that isn’t meaningless because it’s about the very search for meaning. It’s why some people make movies, and why other people go to the movies.

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Hail, Caesar!
Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen
Written by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen
With Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton,
Rated PG-13 for some suggestive content and smoking
106 minutes
Opens today at AMC Loews Georgetown, Regal Hyattsville, Regal Majestic, Landmark Bethesda Row, Landmark Atlantic Plumbing, AMC Courthouse, AMC Shirlington, AMC Mazza Gallerie, Angelika Mosaic, and other are multiplexes.