The majority of “Once Upon” takes place on a February weekend in 1969, introducing us to its two leads, TV actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stuntman and BFF Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Rick was the star of a hit Western show called “Bounty Law” but he’s struggling to figure out what’s next, keenly aware that his days of heroism are ending as he ages out of Hollywood—and he’s encouraged by a bigwig played by Al Pacino to go to Italy to reboot his career with spaghetti westerns. Cliff is way more laid-back, the kind of guy who loves his dog almost as much as he loves Rick and says what he means even to someone like Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), whom he actually fights in one of the film’s most crowd-pleasing scenes. Lee is only one of the familiar names in the film, as Tarantino populates the world around his fictional creations with real famous faces from Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) to James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant).

Of course, as most people know, the real-life figures living next to Rick Dalton are the most controversial ones—Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). Much has already been written about Robbie’s limited line total, and it’s because Tarantino doesn’t see Tate as much as a person as an idea—a glimpse of Hollywood’s optimistic happiness. Whether she’s dancing at a party at the Playboy mansion or sneaking in to watch herself at a public showing of “The Wrecking Crew,” she’s almost glowing every time she appears on-screen, a counter to Dalton’s increasing anxiety. And Tarantino knows that this presentation of a star we know will be snuffed out in the real world adds a sense of melancholy and dread to the entirety of the production, even when it’s not explicitly about Sharon Tate or the hippies out at Spahn Ranch.

The bulk of Tarantino’s film is designed to be a dreamy snapshot of the movie business and life in Hollywood in the late ‘60s. We get dozens of shots of Cliff driving Rick around town, really just to show off the amazing production design, classic cars, and music choices on the radio. The approach by Tarantino and master cinematographer Robert Richardson is incredibly finely tuned, and yet the film never loses that dreamlike aesthetic for the sake of realism—we’re watching a movie not so much about an era but about the movies of that era. It’s a setting once-removed from reality, capturing a time through the way celebrity culture and movies defined it more than the historians. It’s a captivating movie just to live in, complete with long dialogue scenes that some QT fans will say lack the pop and zip of his most playful work but feel more in tune with his character-driven scenes in something like “Jackie Brown.”