Whit Stillman’s first film speaks to danger of the American élite becoming as obsolete and absurd as Europe’s titled aristocracy.

A name jumps out from Whit Stillman’s first feature, “Metropolitan,” from 1990, with a historical power that virtually gashes the close-knit texture of its script and rends the poised canvases of its images: Averell Harriman.

The film is currently enjoying a celebratory revival on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its release. It’s set, according to a title card, in “Manhattan, Christmas Vacation, not so long ago,” in a milieu that’s tightly defined and tightly circumscribed—that of young people in the New York high-society scene of debutante parties and cotillions, or, more specifically, that of preppies. But that word comes under assault by the character Charlie Black (Taylor Nichols), one of the young preppies around whom the movie is built, who asserts, “It's ridiculous to refer to someone like Averell Harriman as a preppy.”

The line is all the more notable for its place at the head of the film’s most brightly-lit bit of repartee, its verbal money shot, in which Charlie, the eternal sidekick yearning for his romantic place in the sun, proposes to rename his entire social class as the Urban Haute Bourgeoisie, or U.H.B.—which the group’s speculatively conservative wit, Nick Smith (Chris Eigeman), instantly one-ups by pronouncing it “uhb.”

Stillman’s movie is about one particular sub-subset of Uhbs, a sliver of a sliver of society: a handful of college students who gyrate between Park and Fifth Avenues, anchored by one of their number, Sally Fowler (Dylan Hundley), whose serenely palatial home is the site of their after-parties. They are seen from the perspective of a newcomer in the group, Tom Townsend (Edward Clements), who, at the start of the film, is drawn into their orbit and then revealed to be something of an outsider—an Upper West Sider, exiled there after his parents’ divorce and, lacking the funds of others, forced to make his name with his intellect.

Tom was born, raised, and educated in the same milieu. In prep school, he had been an admirer of another member of the set, Serena Slocum (Ellia Thompson), and his enduring obsession with her gets in the way of his brewing relationship with another insider, Audrey Rouget (Carolyn Farina), whom he serves as designated escort to the Christmas-season dances and banquets. His conjoined romantic and financial frustration leads him to espouse an outsider’s ideology, a kind of ideological sour grapes—he claims to oppose high-society gatherings on political grounds and defines himself as a socialist, a “Fourierist.” But the very antiquarian terms of his revolutionary doctrine indicate the comical paradox of his situation.

That’s where Harriman (1891-1986) comes in. He was the scion of an industrialist, educated at Groton and Yale, and founded an investment bank. Before and during the Second World War, he was a crucial diplomat for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, charged with special negotiations with Churchill and Stalin. He was Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Secretary of Commerce, Governor of New York, and he ran for President as a Democrat in 1952 and 1956 but lost the nomination both times to Adlai Stevenson. He served in both John F. Kennedy’s and Lyndon Johnson’s Cabinets. He took seriously the obligations of ostensible noblesse and used his abilities, his power, his position, and his wealth to serve some serious version of the public good, on a world-historical scale.

There are three prongs to “Metropolitan” ’s romantic mechanism—Audrey’s attraction to Tom, Tom’s attraction to Serena, and Serena’s involvement with another peripheral member of the group, Rick Von Sloneker (Will Kempe). The third prong provides a crucial link to the looming phantom of Harriman. The conservative, principled wit Nick treats Von Sloneker with open contempt, insulting him to his face and accusing him of involvement in a gang rape that led to a young woman’s suicide. Von Sloneker is the movie’s villain, and Nick draws a line from Von Sloneker’s villainy to Von Sloneker’s social station: “The titled aristocracy are the scum of the Earth.” “What about untitled aristocrats?” Sally asks. “I couldn’t very well despise them, could I?” Nick responds. “That would be self-hatred, which is unhealthy.” Charlie chimes in with the spoken footnote that suggests the movie’s hidden mainspring:

It’s true that the forces that oblige members of the U.H.B. to at least appear to act productively and responsibly carries [sic] little weight, or none at all, with members of society whose social positions are secure no matter what they do.

The essence of “Metropolitan” isn’t so much the U.H.B. but its twilight—the danger that it will be reduced merely to its social traditions and become as obsolete and as absurd as Europe’s titled aristocracy. That was already a threat in the time of Stillman’s youth and was even more conspicuous when he made the film, twenty years later. Throughout the film, young men wonder whether their class is doomed, whether they’re condemned to failure, and what form such failure would take. Harriman, or, rather, Harrimanism is the film’s crucial subject. Though Stillman keeps the seams of the plot tight and doesn’t let his characters, with their “Gatsby”-ish names, encounter other characters from outside their social set (as Fitzgerald has the protagonists of “Gatsby” do), “Metropolitan” is about the possibility—the necessity—and the difficulty of breaking out of their crowd and connecting with the wider world, for the benefit of the wider world.

The movie offers a strange overlay of two times, which comes through in the gendering of public responsibility. Tom talks with Nick, Charlie, and other young and not-so-young men about careers and destinies, and talks with women about books and relationships. The division is certainly not true to the era in which Stillman was filming; by the nineteen-eighties, U.H.B. women were seeking careers on an equal footing with their male peers. But Stillman, born in 1952, built his movie, in large part, on reminiscences, which dated from a time when, for instance, newspapers’ “help wanted” listings were still largely divided between men and women and there were far fewer highly educated women entering the work force and planning to stay in it. Harriman was a big figure in the daily news of Stillman’s youth; soon before Stillman shot the film, Harriman returned to the news with his death, in 1986. The span of eras—and the new expectations of new times, including the reckoning with changing mores and their conflicts with the social codes on which the social set runs—is embedded in the film.

“Metropolitan” evokes the responsibility that social position implies, even if only for the healthy and constructive maintenance of the society in which position is enjoyed. In his second film, “Barcelona,” Stillman dramatized that idea with high comedy and exquisite irony, setting the burden of power and the pleasure of romance into conflict. In “Damsels in Distress,” from 2011—only his fourth feature—he turned explicitly to the enduring power of gender roles and slyly suggested the class component to the politics of sexual revolution.