Earning high praise for ambition and scope but faltering in terms of story and tone, Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling Megalopolis (C-) is a fever dream of a melodrama about characters contemplating the type of world in which they want to live. Seemingly primed to be prescient for election season, the contours aren’t colored with enough clarity to serve as a passable clarion call. Adam Driver’s monotone character contemplates solutions in a conflicted fictional future U.S. city reminiscent of Manhattan with hints of Rome mixed with barely concealed downtown Atlanta shooting locations. The movie is chock full of imaginative set pieces such as a press conference suspended over an urban diorama, a coliseum three-ring circus complete with a bacchanal and a virgin auction and an art deco skyscraper home of an invention lab, and yet the banal screenplay and insufficient visual effects consistently grind momentum to a halt. There’s ultimately a hopeful lilt to the proceedings about the quest for one’s personal utopia, but it’s too often blunted by characters finding themselves derailed (Dustin Hoffman), incomprehensible (Jon Voight), understated (Giancarlo Esposito) or underwritten (Shia LaBeouf). Actresses in the ensemble fare better including Aubrey Plaza who is witty and watchable as a spunky reporter, Talia Shire as Driver’s character’s sassy mom and Nathalie Emmanuel as his love interest from a rival family. The standout music by Osvaldo Noé Golijov punctuates the jarring proceedings with operatic bursts of bombast. The film’s tone careens wildly between sequences, rarely fixing itself upon a compelling narrative. There’s a singular interesting sequence of intrigue late in the film, one genuinely surprising jump scare and several lovely composite images, but the movie’s overall look and feel fails to match the scale of its set-up. Parallels between modern-day political shenanigans and Roman Empire machinations aren’t executed with consistent gravitas. And for its promise of a brave new world, much of the film is inert and ponderous, and the actors all seem to be occupying space in completely different movies. Neither meta conventions nor specific tiny details inspire  the requisite alchemy to help this story cross the chasm to a place of either adequate art house or mainstream appeal. It’s clunky, well-meaning and may spark some conversations.