Wes Anderson knows who he is. it’s not as if he’s oblivious to his own artistic peculiarities: the mix of bone-dry humor and cartoonish tomfoolery, the characterizations so broad they actually feel more authentic than more restrained renderings, and, above all, his intensely precisely visuals that always run the risk of coming across as dioramas jostled to life. The approach that comes across as affectation to his detractors (and, I can personally attest, sometimes even to those of us who are strong supporters) has only grown more pronounced over the years. No other filmmaker’s personal stamp is as immediately identifiable, so much so that it throws the mind into turmoil to imagine him back in the rougher, looser mode of his debut feature, Bottle Rocket. The most ingenious aspect of Anderson’s fantastic new film, Asteroid City, is the delightfully devious way he acknowledges the pervasive artificiality of his own work.

Before we get to Anderson’s deft, tricky feat of story construction alluded to above, let it be typed that Asteroid City is a winning wonder even if theoretically shorn of it’s extra layers. The story that takes up the most screen time involves an annual gathering of budding scientist whiz kids in a small desert town that claims its tourist trap fame because of an asteroid strike thousands of years earlier. In the nineteen-fifties, as A-bomb tests rumble in the not-so-distant distance, a colorful cast of characters convenes and pinballs around with unlikely romances and occasional skirmishes of personality. There’s a little bit of Rushmore to the precocious overachievement and a dash of Moonrise Kingdom in the tentative, innocence-laden flirtation between junior geniuses Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and Dinah (Grace Edwards). But there’s also a sense that Anderson is stretching himself to adopt and adapt from kindred creators to give his movie a little jolt. Most notably, I kept getting a tingle of the Coen brothers’ kookily kinked classic Hollywood patter appropriations in Anderson’s dialogue, particularly the sharp-talking starlet played marvelously Scarlett Johansson and the wisdom-spouting singing cowboy played by Rupert Friend.

While maintaining his usual tight control, Anderson keeps finding inventive ways to tilt the movie into chaos. As much as anything he’s made, Asteroid City feels like possibility unbounded, every semi-kooky notion that flits through Anderson’s brain getting a chance to bloom on screen. That it all works is a testament to the value of Anderson’s constraints. The spinning top can’t careen out of control with him guarding against it causing too much mess. Even when the truly fantastical is introduced to the proceedings, it feels natural and proper, just another way that Anderson’s universe stays in balance.

Anderson also provides another guardrail with the metafictional conceit that undergirds the films. Really, it’s one metafictional idea onion-layered inside another. Literally revealed — and meticulously explained — in the opening moments of the film, the construct is no great secret, but I still don’t want to get more specific than that at this point. Why tediously diagram the joke when simply enjoying that its been told with abundant skill and charm is enough? Abundant skill and charm is a description that can also be applied to Asteroid City as a whole. In the Anderson oeuvre, it’s absolutely top tier.