and if it *is* some kind of Objectivist-adjacent paen to why we should all be ruled by hot psychopaths who look like Adam Driver, then I should already have seen it 11 times and have a ton of defensive and semi-ironic rationalizations but *I literally have no idea what this movie was doing*

I mean, that doesn't necessarily rule out that this is what it was trying to do? Ayn Rand was a proto-fascist and a pretty horrible human being, but she was also a good writer. She could write psychopaths in appealing ways. I don't care for her books, but like, I do get it. But that's the trick.

if this was about how Adam Driver's character was good, why did Coppola not simply trust the existing work of Ayn Rand, which substantially outdoes this story in the realm of having sympathetic characters who speak in something adjacent to neurotypical or even awkwardly masked autistic human speech