This Epic New Movie Is Considered The Odyssey ’s Rival for Best Picture. I’m Not So Sure.

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La Bola Negra, a timeline-hopping epic about three queer men in different eras of Spanish history whose stories overlap and inform one another in unexpected ways, is an overstuffed but intermittently enthralling meditation on the intimate links between fascism and homophobia, as well as a study of the way repression and state violence damage not just the lives of individuals living under those systems but the emotional legacies they pass down for generations to come. The film’s co-directors and co-writers, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (former romantic partners, they bill themselves collectively as “Los Javis”), who won Best Director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for their work on the movie, have previously made only one feature film, the low-budget musical comedy Holy Camp!, though they have also collaborated on several successful queer-themed projects for Spanish television. With La Bola Negra, the Javis take a huge leap forward in terms of both ambition and production. While not every one of its interweaving stories lands with equal power, this two-hour-and-40-minute film has the sweep and audacity of a great modernist novel. It’s hard not to admire the courage and energy with which it keeps asking big philosophical and moral questions, even when the answers to those questions remain vague (or, on a few occasions, painfully clunky).

In the film’s wrenching opening sequence, set in 1937, the population of a small town in northern Spain is preparing festivities to welcome the Italian troops scheduled to arrive that day. This part of the country has aligned itself with Mussolini’s fascist forces against the elected Republican government in the Spanish Civil War, but their Italian visitors seem unaware of this alliance. Even as the village’s local band is practicing the music that will welcome their supposed protectors, Mussolini’s bombers strafe the village, killing most of its inhabitants and taking the young men of the town prisoner to fight on the side of the Nationalist rebels. One of these unwilling soldiers is Sebastián (played by the one-name Spanish musical artist Guitarricadelafuente in his first major film role), a young trumpeter whose mother is killed in the air raid.

Though Sebastián is far from siding with the fascists, he is naive enough to have little sense of what is at stake in the war. At the seaside prison camp where he’s taken, he is assigned to keep armed watch over an injured soldier from the other side, Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), whom the camp’s commanders believe to be in possession of strategic military secrets. Gradually the two men form a bond as they come to realize that they share not only a loathing for the macho bullies who run the camp but also an interest in theater, music, and poetry. Rafael lets Sebastián read a love poem he carries with him at all times, giving him to understand that the lover who wrote it for him—who will later turn out to be the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca—is a man. It’s in Rafael’s company that the sheltered and repressed Sebastián first begins to glimpse the possibility of a life as a gay man who not only acknowledges but embraces his sexual identity, and whose political values align with that sense of expanded personal freedom.

Even as the events of this time frame are being set in place, the viewer is abruptly swept back in time to another story of thwarted desire: In Granada in 1932, a handsome young man from a wealthy family, Carlos (Milo Quifes), applies for a membership at his town’s local “casino”—a kind of elite men’s social club—and is rejected on the basis of his suspected homosexuality. (The “black ball” of the title refers to the color of the glass marbles denoting “no” votes in the casino’s elaborate voting ritual.) The look and feel of these scenes is subtly distinct from that of the grittier sequences involving Sebastián and Rafael. Carlos seems to exist in a more aesthetically stylized realm than those two bruised and grimy soldiers, at one point joining a bar full of revelers in a rapturous flamenco-style song and dance that plays like a dream ballet in a musical. Later these tonal shifts will come to make sense, as we begin to realize that Carlos is a character in a play by Lorca (one of the movie’s inspirations, though it was never finished), titled La Bola Negra. (Other elements of the film’s story are taken from a 2013 play, La Piedra Oscura, by Alberto Conejero, who co-wrote the screenplay with the Javis.) How Carlos’ fictional universe will eventually bring together the film’s two real-life storylines becomes the film’s central puzzle. But for all the pictorial and sonic beauty of the scenes in which he appears, the elegant, anguished Carlos remains more a symbol than a flesh-and-blood character.

In a third timeline, taking place in 2017, we meet Alberto (Carlos González), a queer graduate student and former playwright based in Madrid. Alberto seeks to uncover long-hidden histories of LGBTQ+ life and culture from decades past—an assignment that will soon foist itself upon him not in academia but in real life. Returning from his fieldwork in Greece, he gets a call from the executor of his late grandfather’s estate. That ancestor, whom Alberto never met during his lifetime, has left him some sealed documents that must be picked up in person at the grandfather’s house in a remote village. With the support of his live-in boyfriend (the comedian, director, and former Saturday Night Live writer Julio Torres), and with no help at all from his drug-addicted and openly hostile mother (Lola Dueñas), Alberto tries to piece together the meaning of the papers that his grandfather has entrusted him with. Whose hands do they properly belong in, and what does it mean that Alberto is the one who has been entrusted to place them there?

As Bill Hader’s Stefon character from SNL would put it, La Bola Negra has everything, right down to a bawdy cabaret number performed by a sly Penélope Cruz (who spends only about 10 total minutes onscreen and nearly steals the movie) and a two-scene cameo from a Spanish-speaking Glenn Close as an American Lorca scholar who delivers a lecture to a seminar room full of students including Alberto. Despite the film’s consistently impressive level of craft—the painterly cinematography is by Gris Jordana, the stirring symphonic score by Raül Refree—the three-part story structure has a raw and at times uneven quality. The script seems to spend too much time on some passages, like a long sequence of Carlos wandering through an abstract snowy landscape, while rushing through others, like the clearly deeply troubled relationship between Alberto and his coke-snorting mess of a mother. Still, too much movie is better than not enough, and there’s a generosity to La Bola Negra’s maximalism. It’s as if a whole century’s worth of too-long-silenced queer ancestors had been invited to a raucous, abundant, at times exhausting, but ultimately nourishing feast.