Terrence Malick’s “Knight of Cups,” starring Christian Bale, is the kind of movie that filmmakers make when they’re being honest about their experience. Photograph by Melinda Sue Gordon / Broad Green Pictures / Everett

Perhaps no film in the history of cinema follows the movement of memory as faithfully, as passionately, or as profoundly as Terrence Malick’s new film, “Knight of Cups.” It’s an instant classic in several genres—the confessional, the inside-Hollywood story, the Dantesque midlife-crisis drama, the religious quest, the romantic struggle, the sexual reverie, the family melodrama—because the protagonist’s life, like most people’s lives, involves intertwined strains of activity that don’t just overlap but are inseparable from each other. The movie runs less than two hours and its focus is intimate, but its span seems enormous—not least because Malick has made a character who’s something of an alter ego, and he endows that character with an artistic identity and imagination as vast and as vital as his own.

As such, “Knight of Cups” is one of the great recent bursts of cinematic artistry, a carnival of images and sounds that have a sensual beauty, of light and movement, of gesture and inflection, rarely matched in any movie that isn’t Malick’s own. Here, he—and his cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki—surpass themselves. Where “The Tree of Life” is filled with memories, is even about memory, “Knight of Cups” is close to a first-person act of remembering, and the ecstatic power of its images and sounds is a virtual manifesto, and confession, of the cinematic mind at work. It’s a mighty act of self-portraiture in dramatic action and in directorial creation. And because “Knight of Cups” is about the world of movie-making itself and is set mainly in and around Hollywood, it’s also a vision of the modern world, the world of inescapable images and of their dubious demiurges, of whom the movie’s protagonist, a screenwriter named Rick (played by Christian Bale), is one.

At the beginning of the film, Rick is trying to remember: he recalls, in voice-over, as if addressing his father, a legend about a knight whose father sent him out West in search of treasure—and who, there, was served a drink that made him forget his quest, his origins, himself. The “West” for Rick and the movie is Los Angeles. He has been there for thirty years and feels lost—specifically, feels not like a whole person but like “fragments—pieces of a man” (a marvelous echo of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1971 album). Surfacing from a Lethe of his own making, Rick wants to remember, and it’s one of the movie’s majestic paradoxes that his desire to make himself whole involves not an artificial synthesis from the start but the acceptance of fragments—of incidents, experiences, episodes, impressions—from which their own unifying principle will arise. “Knight of Cups” is Rick’s act of remembering, and it follows the strange double logic of memory—the triggering efforts of willful thought and the free-flowing associations of the unconscious mind.

Between a snippet from “Pilgrim’s Progress” announcing the vision of a dream and some intertitles derived from tarot cards (and there’s a brief scene of a card reading, in Serbian, to bring the theme into action), Malick offers the slightest hint of metaphor to fleeting moments, to visions and sounds that bring pieces of Rick’s latter-day life (as well as flashes of childhood) rushing ahead with an irrepressible energy. The movie organizes itself around several intimate dramas, especially one that recurs throughout the film, the furious and violent bond that Rick has with his father (Brian Dennehy) and brother (Wes Bentley), as well as the death of a third (unseen) brother, which stokes their agony and rage to white heat.

It turns out that the main incidents in Rick’s life, as he sees it, are his relationships with women—some that are bonds of obvious emotional depth, such as his marriage to a doctor (Cate Blanchett), with whom he didn’t have children, to his regret, and his fiercely tender relationship with a married woman (Natalie Portman), and others that are obviously more fleeting, as with an undefined Hollywood starlet (Imogen Poots), a model (Freida Pinto), and a pole dancer (Teresa Palmer).

But, crucially to Malick’s sensibility, these latter characters are at least as sharply lucid about their own lives and about their relationships to Rick as are characters of apparently greater intellectual achievement. The dancer speaks insightfully to Rick about her work and its place in her life, as well as in his own, and Rick recalls her with admiration—as he does the starlet, seemingly a lighthearted playgirl of no obvious professional accomplishment, who nails his heart to the wall when telling him, “You don’t want love, you want a love experience.”

Rick has also had several one-night (or one-day) stands, even a casual threesome, and the movie flickers, intermittently, with his brief recollection of sexual pleasure and the sensual, visual pleasure that goes with it—albeit with an inhibited man’s wistful, slightly self-satirizing detachment mingling delight and regret. (What an idea: that several women with whom Rick had flings years ago should still somehow loom large in his memory years later, and with frank—yet reticently abashed—delight in their bodies! Let other critics throw the first stone.)

Hollywood is a party scene, and Rick has taken part in its revelry. There’s only a little bit of time spent on the business of movies—a few brief meetings with executives, a moment on a set alongside a horse—but lots of time recalling the social side of Hollywood, from vaguely erotic frolics to a formal industry bash where Antonio Banderas, Ryan O’Neal, and Bruce Wagner turn up. (Banderas delivers the movie’s exemplary Hollywood-asshole line, explaining that he changes women as if they were flavors of ice cream.) There’s a relaxed Las Vegas disco party, where Rick has trouble relaxing. Malick doesn’t depict Rick as a man of woe but as an introvert thrust into an extrovert’s playground, as someone who has trouble throwing himself wholeheartedly into the throng because he has the habit of standing back from the event even while within it. (As the model played by Pinto tells Rick, “You told me that sometimes you felt like a spy, always had to pretend.”) An intellectual near-prude who may never have gone near a strip club before getting to Hollywood, an ambivalent party-goer, not a man of the night life, Rick is watching the events from afar, and also seeing himself there, with some embarrassment—and, all the while, he’s filled with images, not ones that he’s actively composing but ones that compose themselves in his mind.

That very vision of spontaneous inner creation is at the core of the film. Lubezki has won Oscars three years in a row—twice for his work with Alejandro González Iñárritu and, before that, for filming Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity,” a trio of films in which he normalizes, rationalizes, and banalizes the boundary-breaking styles that he developed with Malick (it’s like giving Leonardo DiCaprio an Oscar for “The Revenant” rather than for “The Wolf of Wall Street”). Where, for Iñárritu and Cuarón, Lubezki provides a mere adornment to their narrative, for Malick he creates a new way of cinematic seeing—because Malick himself creates a new mode of directing.

For Malick, the cinema is also a matter of the unconscious, of indeterminacy, of tension between decision and accident. Most of the movie’s images are done with a handheld camera, and most of them involve so much motion, on the part of the actors and the camera alike, that they would defy, in the rapidity of their complexity, any attempt to calibrate them in advance to the exact framing and composition. Malick creates the circumstances under which Lubezki can make these images; Lubezki, untethered to storyboards, roaming freely around and past the action, collects images that embody Malick’s ideas and emotions without being overdetermined by his intentions.