Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited film Megalopolis, set in the futuristic city of New Rome, is the movie he’s wanted to make for 40 years. Now that he’s finally written and directed it, what the hell has he created?

The narrative, such as it is, is loosely based on the Catiline Conspiracy of 63 BC, when the aristocrat Lucius Sergius Catilina failed in his attempt to overthrow the Roman consul Marcus Tullius Cicero.

In Coppola’s version, Catilina has become Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), a visionary, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and architect obsessed with rebuilding the crumbling New Rome as a sustainable utopia. His main building block is “Megadon,” a substance he created that allows him to control space and time. His arch-enemy is Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), the mayor of New Rome, a status quo guy. Ostensibly, it’s a fable about tradition versus progress.

In reality, it’s a film that’s angrily, perhaps deliberately, at odds with itself. Coppola’s Catiline may be a shining embodiment of a utopian future – a cross between Iron Man and Howard Roark, the uncompromising architect from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. But he’s also a self-centered megalomaniac who may have poisoned his wife. His ultimate goal, aside from saving humanity, is to stop time – to cheat death.

Despite the film’s bias against Cicero, his fierce opposition to Catiline does not seem entirely unfounded or unreasonable. After all, the New Rome he presides over – which at times resembles one big toga party – does not seem much more dystopian than the supposedly glorious city Catiline envisions.

One of the film’s central flaws is that Coppola never convincingly shows us these glories. It’s a visionary film without a vision. Or maybe there are just too many visions, all jostling for center stage in Coppola’s wild bacchanal.

At times, the film resembles a cross between Blade Runner and Caligula. Perhaps it will become the horror film of our time, the way 2001 and Fantasia worked for previous generations.

But it’s hard to relax with a film this loud. Coppola, a master of actor-direction, lets his cast – which includes Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Aubrey Plaza and Nathalie Emmanuel – overact shamelessly. Laurence Fishburne, playing the film’s ostensible fountain of wisdom, intones weighty lines like “Such are the troubles of the human heart.” Catiline recites Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue. We are treated to clumsily staged orgies, dancing Vestals and fleeting references to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini – all in service of the thesis that empires fall to fascism through moral decay.

Is Coppola drawing some kind of analogy between the world we live in and the New Rome? And is the brilliant, visionary Cesar Catilina, with all his torments and aberrations, somehow meant to be a stand-in for Coppola himself? Coppola financed this $125 million film himself because he wanted complete artistic control. Unfortunately, as I watched it, one thing that went through my mind was: be careful what you wish for.

And yet, to my surprise, I took away something that has stayed with me and even moved me. Years ago, at the time of “One From the Heart,” I wrote of Coppola: “He cast himself as an innovator – a visionary – and yet his great work is firmly rooted in the old-fashioned narrative tradition.” In “Megalopolis,” the director of two of the greatest films of all time – the first two “The Godfather” films – still falsely casts himself as an innovator.

But innovation isn’t everything. Putting aside my reservations, I choose to interpret the film as Coppola’s coded meditation on his own mortality. Like his flawed hero Catiline, he wants to stop time. At 85, having not made a film in over a decade, he has finally realized his passion project. I wish I liked Megalopolis a lot more, but in the end, maybe that doesn’t really matter. A great artist is entitled to his great follies.

Peter Rainer is the film critic for the Monitor. “Megalopolis” has been given an age rating of R due to sexual content, nudity, drug use, language and some violent scenes.