Note: This film is superb on the big screen, where it plays a limited run in big cities before its June 7 Netflix premiere.

Director Richard Linklater is renowned for shaping revelatory performances reflecting on and rhapsodizing about the questions we ask and the stories we tell ourselves to reveal identity as a coping mechanism in a world marked by mighty constructs of time and perspective. He has long observed suburbanite denizens growing, adapting and changing as catalytic forces in the vast universe, and his terrific true crime romantic comedy hybrid Hit Man (A-) displays his contemplative daydreams in one of their most spry, shrewdly entertaining vessels yet. Charismatic star Glen Powell, who also co-wrote the script with Linklater, is pivotal to unlocking the Big Think with Everyman gusto as he portrays a mild-mannered professor and tech guy turned undercover police contractor posing as a hit man. It’s a little on the nose that our hero teaches philosophy; but like Indiana Jones, his side hustle building on arcane fascinations is really what makes the man. One of the film’s great features is the protagonist’s pleasure in trying on different personas; with costumes, wigs, prosthetics, novelty teeth and Powell’s acting alchemy, each of his hired guns embroiled in sting operations plays out like an apt allegory for finding himself. The film is funny and confounds expectations from the get-go, but it really gains its juice when the hit man for hire encounters a potential client in the form of gorgeous relative newcomer Adria Arjana, whose character wants her abusive husband dead. Sexy sparks fly, and it’s a free-for-all about what roles these magnetic stars will play as they maneuver a series of escalating trials of their own personal peculiarities in action. The screenplay crackles with insights and wry dialogue but soars on the hypnotic talents of Powell, who has never been better, and Arjana, who manages to steal scenes in her own right within a talented cast that also includes plum roles for Austin Amelio as a sleazy rival and spunky comedienne Retta as a witty teammate. Linklater could have more adeptly leveraged the film’s New Orleans locale, killed the darlings of a few redundant escapades and curtailed a few of the meta metaphors, but his fabulous film is largely the kind of fun adult Hollywood blockbuster they just don’t make anymore. At one point, the auteur includes a montage of glorious assassin sequences from cinematic history, and by golly this film creatively zigzags its way into that hallowed continuum with buoyant, unpredictable and seemingly effortless charm. As the film’s title character creates his own myth through moonlighting, galvanizing his alter ego in various forms toward the self of his destiny, it is tremendous fun to join him on this journey.