OK, let’s get this out of the way: yes, The Brutalist is long. Very long. Backside-numbingly long. Which is as you might expect of a decades-spanning tale of a Holocaust survivor architect’s bruising encounter with the American dream. Still, that three-and-a-half hour run time seems to have been presented as Exhibit A in the case against Brady Corbet’s film; that it’s too grand, too ambitious, too full of itself. It’s got a bloody interval, for Christ’s sake! Who does this Corbet fella think he is?

Which seems strange, because a lot of what the film has been criticised for is usually seen as an asset. For good or ill, American cinema’s high-water marks, from Citizen Kane to The Godfather and beyond, tend to be big, muscular movies that believe they have something profound to say about the country of their making. And The Brutalist certainly has things to say, however you feel about how it goes about saying them: about art and patronage, the US’s relationship with Europe, and the relentless churn of capitalism. With so many weighty ideas to pack in, that run time starts to look, if anything, a little stingy.

That such a swing for the fences film could be made at all is all the more impressive. We’re in an era of retreat for indie cinema, when many films fail to ever find their way on to the big screen, instead heading straight to streaming and getting lost in the wash of “content”, at a time when horizons have shrunk, along with budgets. The Brutalist’s own budget is small too by modern standards, at less than $10m. But within those strictures, Corbet and his team have managed to construct an uncompromising American epic – and somehow turned a profit. It took a fair bit of sacrifice – Corbet and his partner, the film’s screenwriter Mona Fastvold, have had to cut their cloth accordingly (“swapping champagne for sparkling wine,” is how he puts it), and the director claims not to have made a penny from his latest film. But that is the cost of making something entirely on your own terms, of sheer creative bloody-mindedness.

It’s a characteristic that, as plenty have spotted, is shared by the character at the centre of the film, the fictional Hungarian architect László Tóth, played brilliantly by Adrien Brody. Bauhaus trained, Tóth has built a name for himself in Europe with his austere, clean-lined constructions, but his livelihood – and far more besides – has been disturbed by Hitler’s rise. Separated from his wife and niece, he has survived the Holocaust, but arrives in the US without reputation or money, though still feeling the same sting of antisemitism he experienced in Europe. Tóth soon falls into the orbit of Guy Pearce’s stiff-jawed industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren, whose crass son Harry (Joe Alwyn) has recruited him to renovate his father’s library as a surprise while he is away on business. At first Van Buren hates Tóth’s dramatic update, with its focus on light and space, but attention from the architectural community eventually convinces him of its brilliance. This cycle of adulation and rejection between patron and client will recur throughout the film, sometimes violently.

Soon Van Buren has commissioned Tóth for a grander project: a vast community centre in honour of his late mother. Its construction will span decades, hampered by the changing financial fortunes of its patron as well as Tóth’s own flinty perfectionism (only the finest Tuscan marble will do, after all). Complicating things further is the arrival in the film’s second half of his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), fiercely protective of her husband, and clear-eyed about the person he has gotten into bed with.

It’s that back half – and one particularly shocking scene that completely unravels the relationship between Tóth and Van Buren– that has most divided critics. Certainly, The Brutalist’s big animating moment isn’t subtle – but then subtle gestures wouldn’t really suit the film. Everything about it, like the movement it takes its name from, is designed to be imposing, from Lol Crawley’s stark, wide-angled cinematography to Daniel Blumberg’s relentless, abrasive score. But this is also a film intent on holding your attention once it grabs it, directly plotted and propulsively paced. Assisted by the film’s much maligned but ultimately palate-cleansing interval, that three-and a half-hours-plus run time sails by.

It helps that the performances are as good as they are. This is an impressive return to leading man prominence for Brody, whose career seemed to have been reduced to that of starry bit-parter – popping up entertainingly in Succession or Wes Anderson’s films, but rarely provided with anything to really chew on. That is certainly not the case here: Tóth is both a figure of immense sympathy, but also at times really dislikable – stubborn, resentful, bad-tempered – and Brody is able to bring out his sharp edges. Just as impressive, is Pearce’s performance as Van Buren, a character who could so easily slip into booming-voiced, blue-blooded caricature. But his Van Buren also nurses one hell of an inferiority complex, towards the European aesthete who has drifted into his life, one that he tries to overpower with money and American force of character.

That tension, feels timely as both the US and Europe re-evaluate their relationship with each another. It’s one of the many reasons why, despite its period setting, The Brutalist feels of the moment. This a film that seeks to awe you into submission with its giant images and ideas. When it comes to this year’s best picture, the Academy should think big.