Asteroid City is from beginning to end an extremely baroque joke happy in each of its contradictions. The location in the desert in the 50s brings a social or political reading to the author's cinema hitherto unknown.
The much-lauded order in Anderson's art direction denounces its own invisible, but true, chaos. And finally, that game of narrators who appeal to each other next to the actors who fight to make sense of their characters is the closest thing to a self-sacramental that Anderson's cinema has ever been.