I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie quite like Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood, a project that arrives on the 25th anniversary of its director Quentin Tarantino’s cult-hit, Pulp Fiction, and plays not only with history but with the accumulation of Tarantino’s canon to surprisingly strong effect.

Though I appended a spoiler warning to the front of this piece, I don’t think there’s much I can say that will constitute a spoiler (short of our inevitable discussion of the revisionist history in the third act). There are plenty of films I advise people to see without watching so much as a trailer. The less you know going in, the better. Hollywood is the rare exception, a film that requires much foreknowledge from its audience. To properly taste the layers of irony and comedy that gird the movie, it is necessary to have a working knowledge of the Manson Family, of the murder of Sharon Tate at their hands, and of Roman Polanski. On first viewing, I came home from the theater with lots of homework. Older viewers should keep in mind that, as a writer in his mid-twenties, I never knew Charles Manson as anything other than a crazy old man sitting in prison, and should excuse me for being woefully unacquainted with the specifics of the murders he incited.

Focusing, as the film does, on as dark a subject as the Tate murder, Hollywood remains the most restrained Tarantino film to date in terms of on-screen violence — at least until that third act, which we will get to. The first two hours of the film follow Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his stunt double Cliff (Brad Pitt) over a few days in February 1969 as Rick comes to terms with being at a midpoint in his career. After being the star of a TV Western for a few critically acclaimed seasons (and one decidedly unacclaimed final season) Rick has found himself taking roles as expendable villains in other such shows.

As Rick spends several days shooting for a show called “Lancer”, Cliff takes a parallel journey of his own. Unable to work as Rick’s stunt double (he beat the shit out of Bruce Lee on a previous set), Cliff picks up a flirtatious hippy hitchhiker who asks to be driven to Spahn Ranch. (Those familiar with the Manson mythos no doubt caught on to the horror elements of this sequence much quicker than I.) There, Cliff has strange and increasingly violent interactions with the Mansons before leaving unscathed and unaware of what dark workings are still to come at that dusty outpost.

It is during the first two acts that Tarantino also focuses on — but does not center the film around — the doings of Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie doing The Most with the few lines she’s given). Tarantino works hard to humanize her in a way that almost no other real-life character is allowed. The other Hollywood figures — Bruce Lee, Steve McQueen, Roman Polanski — are reduced to background noise. Tate, by contrast, is shown as a gentle, giddy budding star. As we see her go to the movies alone to see herself in the latest Dean Martin movie, our sense of dread increases with the knowledge that her death is only a few, short months away.

If all of this begins to sound like it isn’t going anywhere, that might just be the point. Tarantino paints Hollywood in 1969 as an easygoing haze through which its central characters drift. Nothing fazes them, and how could it? Aside from the bothersome presence of a few hippies and an abstractly distant Vietnam war, life is good in the balmy climes of the Hills. In Tarantino’s telling, the Tate murder is the splitting point between that idyllic Hollywood of our imagined history and the Hollywood of today, ruled by mega-studios and stripped of its once rugged charm.

Rick Dalton is the living representation of that breezy time, and DiCaprio plays the role with such charming ease that it is easy to overlook the strength of his acting (looking natural in the part has always been Leo’s strength). Even when Rick reaches his lowest point, melting down in his trailer after giving a less than perfect take, Tarantino plays it for comedy. Pitt, too, delivers a performance so loaded with self-assuredness that we feel compelled to join Cliff in his sly-grinning escapades despite several complicated character flaws, including the fact that Cliff most likely murdered his wife.

Tarantino allows these tensions to hang in the air, adding color to the proceedings but never reaching any resolution. Did Cliff murder his wife at sea? Will Rick kick his alcoholism? The movie doesn’t seem to give a shit. It’s peak Tarantino.

Also peak Tarantino: everything about this goddamned movie. Metanarrative devices that make Brechtian theater look like House of Cards? Check. Ultraviolent movies inside of an already ultraviolent movie to comment on the kind of people who love ultraviolent movies? Bloody check. An audacious rewriting of history in the third act? Oh, like none you’ve ever seen. Long set-pieces existing only to indulge the director’s love of an almost fetishistic focus on pop culture touchstones and an unquestionably fetishistic focus on people’s feet? Check and (beleaguered sigh) check. The list goes on (and on).

In the past, Quentin Tarantino’s quintessential Quentin Tarantino-ness has been put to great effect in a variety of ways depending on the story he wants to tell. But despite sharing themes and dynamic elements with Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and other early works, Hollywood seems most closely related to Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino works hard to drive home the comparison early on, cutting abruptly into a scene from one of Rick’s movies in which, armed with a flamethrower, Rick barbeques a roomful of Nazi commanders. It is deliberately evocative of Basterds’ climax, which also features a roomful of Nazis being burned to death. At the end of Hollywood, Rick uses that same movie prop to burn one of the Manson girls to death.

The final act of Inglourious Basterds is unlike anything ever put to screen, remaining in my mind as Tarantino’s greatest masterstroke. The Nazis seated in that theater take great pleasure in the violence depicted by their propaganda film. Each time a bloody death happens onscreen they erupt into applause and laughter. In kind, we as an audience are meant to feel some sense of satisfaction when those Nazis are murdered by the Basterds in a similarly gruesome fashion. It is Tarantino wagging his finger at us for enjoying the kind of blood-fests he specializes in producing, forcing us to question whether our love for gore and excess is ethical, even as Tarantino indulges us in it.

That question becomes even more explicit during the final act of Hollywood. The Mansons, arriving (as in real life) at the house of Sharon Tate, have been ordered by Charles to murder everyone inside “as gruesome as possible.” This is where Tarantino’s revisionism begins. Before the would-be murderers can carry out their plan and forever change the course of history, they are confronted by a belligerently drunk Rick Dalton who, mistaking them for common hippies, screams at them to turn their car around and get off his private road. The Mansons do as they’re told, but Tex recognizes Rick as the star of “Bounty Law.”

“That show was all about violence and killing. What if we kill the people who taught us to kill?”* asks one of the Manson girls. The others agree to the change of plan, head back up the hill, and burst into Rick’s living room. From there, the scene plays out as Tarantino likes: the Mansons meet brutal ends at the hands of an acid-tripping Cliff, Cliff’s dog, and Rick himself.

*I may not have remembered that quote verbatim, but its pretty damn close.

I puzzled over the meaning of the ending for quite some time, but ultimately its a very simple one. Being shown fake violence onscreen is not an excuse to perpetrate it in real life. It is one thing to enjoy the make-believe fantasy of seeing people as evil as the Mansons torn apart by an affable hillbilly and his dog, but quite another to remember that, in actuality, it was the Mansons who did the killing that night, brutally and without any mercy.

Much will be made this year of whether the climax of Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood constitutes the exploitation of a tragedy. I firmly maintain that it does not. This is Tarantino’s love letter, not only to the Hollywood that was but to an incredibly gifted actress taken from the world before her time. It is a reckoning from a filmmaker who has, for a quarter-century, built his cult of personality around unflinching depictions of shocking violence, an admonition of those who practice violence filtered through the lens of that violence.

Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood might not be an instant classic, but it is an unequivocal masterpiece from a visionary filmmaker at the peak of his career. It is just as insightful in what it does not question as in what it does, just as impactful in what it chooses to ignore as in what it chooses to confront, and just as manic as it needs to be.