But that mockery deserves its full context, too. Consider our nation: The president is in his 70s, as are his three leading challengers, as well as the Senate majority leader and the speaker of the House. It’s estimated that nearly one-quarter of the 2020 electorate will be over the age of 65. Baby boomers remain the largest age cohort in the country, as they have been their entire lives. There’s no shortage of actors who would leap at the chance to play a younger version of a Robert De Niro character — just as De Niro himself, 45 years ago, won his first Academy Award for playing a younger version of Vito Corleone. But with “The Irishman,” Scorsese has made a film in which a 61-year-old Ray Romano feels like a fresh face; its lead actors are, on average, older than the old people in “Cocoon,” a movie in which you definitely didn’t see Wilford Brimley curb-stomp anyone. So if you wanted to stir up young people’s long-simmering resentment of their elders, who seem reluctant to cede their power over anything and everything that happens in this country, you could do far worse than the sight of De Niro’s awkward beat down.

It’s impossible to think about “The Irishman” without considering the press cycle Scorsese wound up creating around the film. Just before its release, in an interview with Empire magazine, the director opined that Marvel superhero movies don’t really qualify as “cinema” — wonderfully crafted entertainments, maybe, but not art. This was like waving a red cape in the face of a very annoying bull: Fans of this sort of movie tend to react furiously to the sense that anyone is looking down on them from loftier artistic grounds, or to the idea that loftier artistic grounds exist at all. What is funny is that “The Irishman” is, in some ways, the “Avengers: Endgame” of Scorsese’s own movie universe — long and expensive, collecting his regular actors and milieus into one culminating story highly dependent on computer-generated effects.

It’s no wonder so much attention fell on these 27 seconds of stomping. You could certainly watch them and conclude that the decision to digitally fiddle with De Niro’s age and face was a poor one. His character, across the length of the film, seems less like a man seen at different ages and more like a collection of separate men, each well past 50 but each with a unique skin-care regimen. It is remarkable, really, how much online attention to this film has revolved around its actors’ bodies. An image circulated of De Niro wearing huge platform shoes to approximate Sheeran’s height; another focused on a World War II scene in which the effects make him look like a video-game soldier. Scorsese himself has joked about a scene in which a 79-year-old Al Pacino, playing a 40-something Jimmy Hoffa, had to leap up from a chair, but couldn’t manage to look much younger than 62.