Tolstoy said that there are only two stories: “a man goes on a journey” and “a stranger comes to town.” Superman happens to be both: a square-jawed every-Adonis from middle America who is, in fact, an alien. He has to leap over coastal skyscrapers and prop them up when they teeter over children and widows, but he crams his preposterous frame into phone booths to don his costume in secret. The constant pressure to conceal his identity makes him a stranger to most of his loved ones and endangers those few who know the truth; he’s not quite of his adopted world or of the planet he came from.

Because he’s virtually invincible, Superman stories only work on a dramatic level if they lean into this cycle of disillusionment and self-discovery. James Gunn’s new vision for the character (simply: Superman) is built around a clever gambit that fractures his sense of self: the video message his alien parents sent with their infant on a spaceship bound for Earth, long thought to be damaged, is reconstructed only to reveal a nefarious intent rather than the benevolent one he’s always inferred.

Gunn is a veteran of Hollywood’s comic book boom, having directed the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy for Marvel before being tapped by Warner Bros. to oversee their DC adaptations. Like the Guardians movies, Superman is breezy and colorful, closer in spirit to Tim Burton’s Batman than to Christopher Nolan’s. This is probably the better tonal register for the character—it’s at the very least a welcome corrective to Zack Snyder’s drab, dour Man of Steel, which in 2013 reached the nadir of post-Dark Knight superhero self-importance.

But Gunn takes this lightness and tries to bend it in every direction imaginable. This is a film about the beauty of chosen community and the sterilizing nature of living as a transplant; the need for rigorous ethics and the virtue of blind faith; tech and Trump and Musk and, yes, Gaza. The geopolitics are at once surprisingly clear-eyed and frustratingly naive—the villain’s vapid girlfriend is a punchline before, during, and after her stint as a selfless informant. Gunn is the sole credited screenwriter, and that makes sense: These feel less like thrice-approved studio notes than the markers of a hyperactive mind who has imagined his hero in innumerable real-life scenarios and wants to leave it all out there on the screen.

Superman was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, a writer and artist, respectively, who met in high school during the Depression. Siegel had self-published a short story called “The Reign of the Superman”—a parable about a homeless man who is pulled from a bread line and duped by a craven scientist into drinking a potion that gives him magical powers, which he uses for his own, selfish ends. He tries to take over the world, only to return to that same bread line when the powers wear off.