Second, the film creates poetic visuals that echo Stevens’ use of bright primary colors, elegant panel design, and sudden shifts in space. In the scenes involving the Karloff-like henchman Lothar, Johnston often uses a dark silhouette against a single bright blue, green or purple (much as Beatty had done the year before on “Dick Tracy”), along with the canted angles of Universal horror films. His edits are often witty, cutting from a newsreel of Hitler to a close-up of Nazi sympathizer Sinclair in his Hollywood mansion; at another point, a tense stand-off in a diner ends with the click of an empty gun-barrel, as matched to the click of a photographer’s camera at a swank nightclub. The matches create tension and irony, but also connect the small airfield where Cliff and Peevy discover the rocket to the larger spaces of Los Angeles and Hollywood, which offer both danger and—via the glamour and coincidences of the Dream Factory—the solutions to the characters’ problems.

That kind of matching lets the filmmakers have their cake and eat it, too, offering a visual shorthand that can speed up the pacing of individual scenes, even as the overall narrative takes its time in getting started, focusing more on character and atmosphere than action and story. That’s the final choice, and the one big change Johnston and the writers make to Stevens’ book (which met with his hearty approval): instead of simply being a brilliantly told set of action sequences, screwball banter and fun slapstick—like the comicthe film of “The Rocketeer” works hard to make its silly, serial-movie coincidences feel organic and character-driven, at least as much as the genre and the summer blockbuster frame will allow. It’s important to remember that the blueprint of the superhero film, like those Cliff and Peevy find stashed with the rocket in the plane, was still undergoing changes and tests in 1991, and had not yet hardened into a formula. It’s refreshing now to see just how much care is taken with these choices in “The Rocketeer,” from the many scenes devoted to building Cliff ’s relationship with girlfriend and Jenny (played by Connelly, and both more demure and more of an active narrative agent than the Betty of the books), to those scenes with Cliff and Peevy, to the way the action is constantly and successfully deployed as an objective correlative for love, friendship, family and responsibility. There’s a lot of giddy fun to be had in “The Rocketeer”’s action, and it has fun spoofing itself, too, but it never loses sight of how all of that will mean more if we have an investment in its characters.

Along with the rich period mise-en-scène, that action is where the film’s retro heart beats strongly. The “Cirrus X3” that Howard Hughes designs looks like the future to its 1938 characters, but to contemporary audiences, its Deco-era sci-fi appearance makes it a symbol of a seemingly “simpler” past, and the movie smartly stages its action scenes to work off that set of associations. The film owes less to state-of-the-80s modern effects than to the more hand-made craftsmanship of Classic Hollywood masters like “King Kong”’s Willis H. O’Brien. From the initial moment Cliff takes flight in order to save his friend Malcolm from a sputtering bi-plane, it’s clear the action will build off the sleight of hand we saw in the credits, offering enormous skill designed to appear casual, even “accidental.” Cliff is a hero because of his heart, not his powers or his expertise, and the movie doesn’t mind if we see the seams of its wizardry here and there, from its model work to its rear projection. And, as with its slow narrative build, the filmmakers smartly expand the range and styles of their sequences to match Cliff’s learning curve. The bi-plane rescue near the start looks and feels like the “Captain Cody" serials Dave Stevens grew up on; the middle sequence at a swank nightclub (when Cliff breaks in to save Jenny from Neville Sinclair’s machinations) combines the lush set design of a Paramount comedy of the period with slapstick straight out of Laurel and Hardy, as Cliff’s attempts to control his jet-pack in the confined space are alternately exciting and full of silly pratfalls. By the time we get to the film’s climax, however, involving gangsters, Nazis, G-men, and a very unstable zeppelin, the movie can confidently give itself over to the sorts of Indiana Jones heroics Stevens had helped Spielberg to plan a decade earlier—both Cliff and the film’s arc of action have earned it.