Francis Ford Coppola’s monumentally ambitious, comically excessive, totally over-the-top, macro-maximalist and metacinematic new movie, “Megalopolis,” is defiantly unreviewable, but I must register my astonishment and try to wrap a few sentences around my impressions of one of the most extraordinary works of art I’ve encountered in recent memory, or maybe ever. The 85-year-old writer-producer-director has swung for the fences and knocked the park out of the ballgame, audaciously razing and reinventing his medium, his screen of dreams.

My favorite Coppola films are his early masterpieces “The Conversation” and “The Godfather,” perfectly made, mesmerizing, consummate realizations of recognizable Hollywood genres that at the same time felt completely original. As a literary storyteller (“The Godfather” is one of the few movies better than the novel it’s based on) and painterly composer of visual images, Coppola earned my awe and admiration for his artistic brilliance and unique genius. If many of his subsequent movies were not to my taste, at least he had the courage to follow his own experimental instincts and not repeat successful formulas in genres he’d already mastered. But what I’d heard and read about “Megalopolis” — the positive, the negative, the scandalous and the bewildered — made it sound at least interesting, so on a hot afternoon I took my senior discount into the cool darkness of a movie theater, to me the only acceptable venue for watching a real movie.

Suspending critical judgment, surrendering to the filmmaker with an open mind — I could walk out anytime if I didn’t like it — I kicked back in the reclining armchair built for someone twice my size and let the images on the big screen have their way with me. The stills I had seen in print, and even the two-minute trailer I watched online, looked absurdly stylized, nonsensical, incoherent in their fragmentation. I learned from the first minutes that the only way to watch this movie properly is all the way through, that nothing would make sense out of context and that context itself is constantly shifting, mixing and mutating; it is fascinatingly layered but beyond rational analysis; you just have to go with the flow, as when reading a poem by an absinthe-addled surrealist.

But surrealism is scarcely sufficient to describe the neo-post-postmodern multidimensional and timeless eclecticism of genres and sources, tones and traditions, styles and archetypes Coppola appropriates and mobilizes for his operatic intentions. “Megalopolis” is subtitled “A Fable,” which gives its creator license to abandon any pretext of realism in search of something far more magical, mythical and perhaps meaningful.

The plot: A melancholic architect of megalomaniacal ambition, head of the city’s Design Authority, with an occult ability to stop time, is bemusedly charmed by the wild daughter of his archrival, the mayor of New Rome, a mashup of ancient Rome and a “Blade Runner”-esque futuristic-dystopian New York City, with countless quotes from other cinematic and literary classics, as various incestuously related family members and political plotters act out their roles in this power-warped, sex-torqued existential drama. The architect is of course an avatar for the archetypal Artist who conceives and creates a physical manifestation of his Vision. He is equally heroic and ridiculous, dangerously messianic, profound and hilarious in his philosophical grandiosity, and as he pursues his quest to create Utopia he passes through a manic fantasia of landscapes and settings and periods and moods this epic trip is breathlessly exhausting and exhilarating to witness, as much for the thousands of astounding images as for the witty, literate, dead-serious yet subtly ironic writing.

If you crave something that conveys the craziness of our age while at the same time transforming and transcending it in a major creative statement about everything, “Megalopolis” is well worth checking out.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.