Let it never be said that Wes Anderson is oblivious about the sometimes chagrined reactions to his peculiar, distinctive aesthetic. For me, all those precisely precious shot compositions and loquacious, snappy-patter cascades of dialogue generally give his films an added buoyancy that makes the best of them absolutely sparkle and can nearly salvage the weaker entries. Even so, I get how the deliberately, playful artificiality can rankle those who aren’t happy adherents. Asteroid City suggests that Anderson gets it, too. Analyzing only the main story the film is telling, Asteroid City is as packed with Anderson’s affectations as a freshly stocked gumball machine is full of colorful spheres. In an retro-zingy desert town during an idyllically considered version of the American nineteen-fifties, a bevy of quirky characters convene to sulk and flirt and perform. The kids are precocious, and the older folks are curmudgeonly in a weirdly sweet way. The jokes come as quick as firecracker bangs, and a ludicrously starry cast — Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Jeffrey Wright, Jason Schwartzman, Liev Schreiber, and Steve Carell among them — made tidy feasts of scenes that alternate between bustling and contemplative. If that were all that Asteroid City entailed, it would probably still make for a dandy entertainment, but Anderson is up to something far trickier. Within Anderson’s broader fiction, there is a television program, presided over by a host (Bryan Cranston) with stentorian sternness, that dramatizes the creation of a stage play that tells the same story that unfolds in the film’s main plot. Anderson and his co-credited screenwriter, Roman Coppola, have devised a meta-narrative puzzle box that has been greased up with cheeky, briskly explained conceits to make it that much more difficult to grasp onto. If Anderson’s heavy-handed styling is dismissive of realism, Asteroid City is here to present a reminder that he is in the business of telling stories. And at their core, most modern stories are really stories about stories about stories anyway. Accepting the flourishes of make-believe is part of the bargain for those who take in the tale. Asteroid City is also proof that the bargain is well worth taking.