Armstrong told me that one source of inspiration for Mountainhead came from the podcasts he binged while researching Succession’s tech storyline, and the movie has the vibe of four would-be alpha males fighting over the same microphone, rattling off jargon about transhumanism and four-sigma IQs. It plays like a gonzo satire of Silicon Valley self-talk, except that every time you pause to Google some absurd term or another, it turns out to be real. Like Succession’s not-quite-Murdochs, the movie’s characters are all transparently inspired by actual people: Venis, with his pharmaceutical exuberance and lust for getting humanity “off planet,” is Elon Musk with a social media network that’s closer in size to Mark Zuckerberg’s; Randall, who cites Hegel and Marcus Aurelius without fully grasping their ideas, is Peter Thiel; Jeff, the A.I. whiz who has enough of a conscience to express remorse but not enough to override his competitive drive, is like a combination of the Sams Altman and Bankman-Fried. (Hugo, who keeps trying to insist that his cash-burning meditation business is actually a “lifestyle super-app,” could be any wannabe who’s wildly rich by any standard except the one he’s chosen to hold himself to.) The collateral damage of Traam’s hands-off approach to disinformation barely exaggerates the destruction wrought by Facebook in Myanmar or WhatsApp in India, and as Musk’s impending exit from the White House spawns a flood of leaks about the drugs he was allegedly mainlining while ripping the wires out of the federal government, the movie starts to feel less like Dr. Strangelove and more like Last Week Tonight.

For all its absurdist touches, Mountainhead hits hardest—and, not to put too fine a point on it, harder than just about any movie released in theaters this year—when it’s more quietly observant. The way Hugo casually leans against a painting in his newly furbished mansion speaks volumes about the tech world’s relationship to art, and when Randall and Jeff compare their biometric data—“I’ve got a sleep score of 80”—you don’t need to be told that they’ve gamified everything in their lives, because that’s the only way to know who’s won. (Randall doesn’t tell the others that the illness he has been fighting has recently been pronounced terminal, insisting instead that, for him, “cancer was net-net a big positive.”) Smith, who after playing Chevy Chase in Saturday Night is quickly cornering the market on smug assholes, perfectly captures tech evangelists’ messianic disregard for the lives of mere humans, insisting that the way through the catastrophic consequences of his deepfake generator is simply to “show users as much shit as possible until everyone realizes nothing’s that fuckin’ serious.” The movie feels at first like a broad-stroke caricature, but the longer you inhabit these characters’ headspace, the clearer it becomes how much we’re already living in the world they’ve made, except that for us, the theories aren’t just theories. They dream the dreams, and we suffer the realities.

In November, when the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong got the idea for his caustic new movie, “Mountainhead,” he knew he wanted to do it fast. He wrote the script, about grandiose, nihilistic tech oligarchs holed up in a mountain mansion in Utah, in January and February, as a very similar set of oligarchs was coalescing behind Donald Trump’s inauguration. Then he shot the film, his first, over five weeks this spring. It premieres on Saturday on HBO — an astonishingly compressed timeline. With events cascading so quickly that last year often feels like another era, Armstrong wanted to create what he called, when I spoke to him last week, “a feeling of nowness.”

He’s succeeded. Much of the pleasure of “Mountainhead” is in the lens it offers on our preposterous nightmare world. I spend a lot of my time saucer-eyed with horror at the rapid degeneration of this country, agog at the terrifying power amassed by Silicon Valley big shots who sound like stoned Bond villains. No one, I suspect, can fully process the cavalcade of absurdities and atrocities that make up each day’s news cycle. But art can help; it’s not fun to live in a dawning age of technofeudalism, but it is satisfying to see it channeled into comedy.

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Journalists can write exposés about these men, just as they have about the family of Rupert Murdoch, on whom “Succession” was based. But art and entertainment can make such figures feel real in a more visceral, emotional way. That’s one reason it’s important for pop culture to engage with America’s disorienting descent into clownish authoritarianism.

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The way Carell’s character kept talking in riddles pissed me off. His lines weren’t even good comedic relief; they just confused me even more.

As a whole, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the performances, especially since they all just played slightly different versions of the same character inspired by the likes of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and even Elon Musk