BRady Corbet’s astonishing and compelling epic, The Brutalist, is about the design of post-war America and what was built into its foundations. It asks us to decide whether and how the brutalism of the title applies to anything other than architecture, and raises questions about the future ruin of what we all imagine on the drawing boards of youth: an American Ozymandias.

It is about anti-Semitism and the capitalist adventure, about the experiences of unassimilated immigrants and about American naivety towards the tragic and painful depths of European culture and expertise.

This is a film of gripping directness and narrative power, a film that fills its widescreen and three-and-a-half hour running time with absolute assurance and ease, as well as glorious breadth, clarity and even simplicity – and yet in its beautiful form one can sense something darkly mysterious and uncanny.

It feels like it must be based on a true story, or at least a literary source – but it is an original screenplay by Corbet and his co-screenwriter Mona Fastvold. It is the biography of the fictional Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth, who comes to the post-war US in poverty but begins, or rather revives, his stellar career under the impulsive, eccentric patronage of a wealthy man with the WASP-presidential name of Van Buren. This is a rough and aristocratic fellow who has the good taste and imagination to recognise Tóth’s gifts, but eventually reveals a dark side in his bigotry, violence and envious shame at his own mediocrity.

Adrien Brody plays Tóth with edgy ferocity and passion: surely the high point of his career and an improvement on his performance in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. His wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and orphaned niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are stranded in Europe and caught in bureaucratic chaos.

Tóth’s carefree, wealthy cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) initially offers Tóth a job in his Philadelphia furniture store, but his American Catholic wife – Attila has converted to Catholicism and anglicized his name – fatefully opposes Tóth. His only male friend is Gordon (played with dignity and restraint by Isaach de Bankolé), a widower, war veteran and single father whom Tóth met in the bread line.

And Harrison Van Buren is played beautifully by Guy Pearce, with rich tailoring, sideburns and a comforting, droning tone born of his addiction to Madeira; perhaps inspired by the voice of John Huston, which Daniel Day-Lewis found for his role as the tormented oil magnate in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

From the outset, there is something ominous about the half-starved European artist’s encounter with the fat American plutocrat, and perhaps also about his encounter with the United States itself. When Tóth staggers out of the hold of his immigration ship to take his first ecstatic look at the Statue of Liberty, he is dazed, dazed, and the statue is disturbingly upside down (like the upside-down shots in Corbet’s comparable Euro-American parable The Childhood of a Leader).

Tóth is commissioned to remodel Van Buren’s library in his palatial estate – although Van Buren knows nothing about it; the job was given to him as a birthday surprise in his absence by his boastful and slick son, Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn). Tóth is excited by the possibilities offered by the library’s high ceilings and its atrial light source, shapes that seem to inspire him for the rest of his career, although we don’t find out what the real inspiration is until the very end.

Van Buren Sr. is initially furious that his idiot son dares to trick these unkempt foreigners into rebuilding his library behind his back, but then he is delighted by the bold modernist redesign, which makes the library seem larger than it is. One of Van Buren’s dinner guests says it looks like the endless library in a short story he once read (presumably Borges’ The Library of Babel).

So he offers Tóth a fortune (and also uses his political contacts to bring Erzsébet and Zsófia to the US) so that Tóth can organize the construction of a huge community center in the city in memory of his late mother – a vast and metastasizing folly resembling the Xanadu mansion in Welles’ Citizen Kane. Van Buren actually insists on entertaining Tóth with his own Rosebud moment – when he humiliated his impoverished grandparents, who had been cruel to his beloved mother but begged him for money when he made it big.

But Tóth’s haughty perfectionism, short temper and his own drinking and drug problems make the project an ordeal. The Protestant locals are suspicious of Tóth because he is Jewish, and costs exceed expectations from the start, despite Tóth telling his patron how cheap concrete is compared to marble. Moreover, Van Buren’s hated grandparents seem to love marble, which further entices Van Buren to support concrete. When the pair finally visit the spectacular marble quarries of Carrara – an exceptionally late sequence – it is another bad omen.

The Brutalist obviously has something of Ayn Rand, but also of Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow in its depiction of the US immigrant adventure and the promise of success – but perhaps Corbet and Fastvold go further and faster into the dizzying sensuality and sexuality of it all. The film shows us the violence and savagery – not the same as “brutalism” – that accompany capitalist failure and success, with Van Buren Sr. (and perhaps Junior) guilty of rape.

It’s an electrifying work, stunningly filmed by cinematographer Lol Crawley and superbly designed by Judy Becker. I left the film dazed and euphoric, dizzy from gawking at its monumental vastness.