We get a sense, as in most Malick films, of civilization holding nature at bay, or falsely believing that’s what it’s doing. Leaves fall, flowers wave, pollen swirls in the air, the sun peeks through treetops, but we also hear jet engines and car horns, amplified music and feedback. Flocks of bats whirl in the air near the Congress Street Bridge in downtown Austin. Dogs snuggle with their owners. Deer explore suburban lawns. Gosling takes a break from tending to his dad, goes outside, and feeds a horse an apple while interstate traffic rumbles through the background. One of the film’s modernist houses is built around an old, tall tree that rises through a skylight. The whole film could be a premonition of Pocahontas, the heroine of “The New World,” after moving to England.

Spectacle and sensation are all. Live songs start a few bars in and end a half-minute later. Classical score music, narration and dialogue compete with them, creating a cacophony that is sometimes pleasurable, sometimes grating. Malick and his regular cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki, capture concert scenes in outdoor venues with thousands of people, and intimate scenes in gorgeously decorated homes where characters practice songs or noodle on a piano or guitar. The actors are filmed as if they were dancers performing without the aid of a choreographer. Women pirouette and skip like little girls. Men mock-battle each other over a woman or roughhouse in the grass like little boys. Fassbender imitates an angry ape and makes Gosling laugh so hard he falls over. Such bits could be a statement about the eternal child inside every adult or they might be examples of what actors do when they aren’t sure what they’re supposed to do. This was not a distinction that mattered much in other Malick films, even recent, maligned ones, but it matters here because the movie is so entropic.

Malick’s cast features many famous musicians, including Iggy Pop, whose chest and abs draw stares of amazement from Lubezki’s camera, and Patti Smith, who talks about her husband Fred’s 1994 death from a heart attack with such insight that you may wish you were watching a documentary about her instead. An uncredited Val Kilmer appears in a concert sequence, plunging a chainsaw into an amplifier and telling the crowd, “I got some uranium … I bought it off my mom!” About halfway through, Fassbender starts turning into his character from “Shame.” Mara and Gosling never turn into anything. The hint of a roiling interior life that Blanchett manages to give her character feels more anchored than anything else in the movie, except for a tight close-up of Gosling contemplating his father’s mortality and a scene of Mara arguing with her dad in a gas station parking lot.

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