When it was first announced that Quentin Tarantino was going to do a film centered around the Manson Family murder of Sharon Tate and her three houseguests, there was immediate concern that the film would be an exploitative blood bath. I, for one, wasn’t all that worried. For all his punkish aesthetic, fetishization of violence, and bad boy posturing, Tarantino has a rather strict moral code (think about his recent slate of revisionist history films where the oppressed take down the oppressors). In that sense, he’s downright old-fashioned.

It’s the old fashioned Tarantino who takes center stage in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which, it turns out, is less about the Tate murders and more about a particular time in Hollywood history—when black and white turned to color, when films about cowboys and police officers grew more morally complex, when pants-legs got wider and sideburns got longer, when youth and drug culture exploded, and, yes, when the hippies came to town.

Tate, played by Margot Robbie, is a character in the film but not the main one. We see the young starlet arrive in Hollywood, with her new husband, the director Roman Polanski. She’s beautiful and filled with optimism. There’s a poignant scene where she goes to a downtown movie theater and gets a ticket for The Wrecking Crew, the Dean Martin film she has a supporting role in. We watch the pride and happiness wash over her as the audience laughs at the antics of her klutzy character. As her face glows beatifically from the light being cast off the screen, it feels like a benediction of sort, a moment of bliss for a doomed character. So yes, Tate, and what we know of her awful fate, hovers over the film, giving it a slightly ominous edge, but she’s not the film’s primary focus. Instead, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a classic buddy film, and an homage to the Hollywood of old.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton (perfect name), a strong, silent type of Hollywood actor, who specialized in Westerns and Nazi-hunting WWII flicks. His TV show, Bounty Law, has been cancelled and he’s now doing guest spots on other TV shows, usually playing the heavy. When he’s approached by a Hollywood broker of some sort (Al Pacino) to make spaghetti Westerns in Italy, he begins to process the depressing truth: He’s on the downside of his career, his Hollywood leading man days are behind him. Beset by self-loathing, he begins drinking (even more) heavily.

At his side, loyal as ever, is his best friend and stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Cliff is a war vet and a certified cool guy—with his moccasin-style shoes, aviator sunglasses, and Hawaiian shirt, he’s clearly lot more laid back than Dalton. Cliff lives with his adorable and obedient pit bull in a trailer that overlooks the Van Nuys drive-in movie theater (I’m not exaggerating when I say that some of the film’s best scenes involve Cliff feeding his dog). And he’ll do just about anything for his buddy Rick.

Tarantino plays to both actor’s strengths, and they are both wonderful. Pitt gives Cliff a “been there, done that” weariness, coupled with a cocksure grin, and an unrushed way about him. He’s almost comically strong and brave and righteous, but Pitt plays him with so much lived in, natural charisma, you believe in him—or at least, want to believe in him.

DiCaprio’s role is much more dark and complex—and the actor is nothing short of brilliant. He deftly switches from his “hey there little lady” style public persona to the tormented, self-doubting, twitchy alcoholic he is in private. “You’re Rick Dalton!” he screams at the mirror, all but begging himself to channel the confidence of his screen roles into his real life.

Tarantino’s style for the past several years has been to incorporate lengthy set pieces—almost short films within his films—into his movies, which he does here. In one, Cliff gives a pretty hitchhiker a ride to Manson Farm, a converted film set, where he meets many of the famous Manson players and insists upon checking up on his old friend, the ranch’s aging owner George Spahn, played by Bruce Dern. We’re worried for Cliff, but he’s so half-amused, half-disgusted by the Manson Family members and so languorously confident, we go along for the ride with him.

In another, Dalton finds himself on the set of a cowboy show where he’s guest starring as the bad guy. It’s here that he meets a precocious child actress (Julia Butters) who first takes pity on him and later gives him a much needed confidence boost. “That was the best acting I’ve ever seen in my whole life,” she says, and it tells you something about Dalton’s fragile state that the words of an 8-year-old mean so much to him.

The film looks incredible. You truly feel like you’re in Hollywood in the ’60s, with the neon signs and tacky, faux-Mexican restaurants and shiny convertibles. The film has a wonderful golden glow about it—a beauty that suggests that the old Hollywood Dalton longs for was worth preserving. And although it has a staggering 2 hours 45 minute runtime, it’s impossible to resist the way Tarantino luxuriates in the world he has recreated—from parties at the Playboy Mansion to film sets where a young Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) picks a fight with Cliff to joy rides on the Sunset Strip.

Honestly, I could’ve watched the film for two more hours, but I do have one small quibble: There’s an inexplicable narration that pops up once, early in the film, and then again, for an extended period of time late in the second half. Narrations are generally lazy devices, and this one seems particularly arbitrary. (I almost wonder if Tarantino is referencing something I don’t understand. Were sporadic narrations a staple of B movies in the 60s?).

As for the film’s ending, some will love it, some will hate it. (I loved it.) I will say that it provides that burst of absurdist violence we were all waiting for. The rest of the film is less hopped up on Red Bull and show-offy than most of Tarantino’s works. It has a confident, leisurely pace. If this represents the beginning of a new, more mature era for the aging phenom—his Cliff Booth phase, if you will—I couldn’t be more excited for it.

He’s 49 years old, but in some ways, Quentin Tarantino is still that genius kid in the video store. We can still see him rubbing his hands gleefully as he makes his films, drunk on film’s possibility. He makes up his own rules, smashing through genres, audaciously blurring time periods, laughing in the face of cinematic convention. He’s the filmmaker reimagined as part Mozart, part Willy Wonka, and part Sid Vicious. The end product is almost always obscenely entertaining.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that Tarantino is all raging id. There’s rigor and even scholarship in his work. Indeed, it takes a lot of discipline to be so brilliantly anarchistic.

Tarantino makes me laugh at and revel in things I generally don’t like—extreme violence, for one; offensive language for another—which is one of his great gifts. Like all talented filmmakers, he’s a con-man, a grifter. He gets away with things because he’s that good. (Kids, do not try this at home.)

But I do think that, for all his mad scientist tricks, Tarantino’s greatest (and perhaps most underappreciated) gift is writing dialogue. Each character gets his or her on own patois, his own idiom, and delights in his own language—whether it be cracked slang or floridly pretentious wordplay. And when Tarantino wants to write someone genuinely witty and eloquent—as is the case with Django Unchained’s droll bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz)—it’s a marvelous thing to behold.

Tarantino’s last film was the enormously satisfying Inglourious Basterds, a warped revenge pic about a gang of Jewish toughs killing Hitler. As a Jewish woman, I can say I had zero problem with Tarantino taking on my people’s collective tragedy. The genius was, it was the Jews who did the clobberin’. I cheered wildly.

Tarantino seems to be on his “if only history was super cool” kick right now. Because with Django Unchained, he’s getting his revenge on white slave owners in the south. In many ways, this is a companion piece to Inglorious Basterds—we’re still squarely in revenge flick mode, but instead of WWII spy clichés, Tarantino now mixes up a gumbo of spaghetti Westerns, blaxploitation, and even sweeping romance films. He wields the same trick as in Basterds: Tarantino may not be black, but he allows the film’s hero—Jamie Foxx’s freed slave Django—to do the majority of the butt-whipping. It doesn’t feel exploitative. It feels cathartic.

The plot, in short: Schultz rescues Django because he can identify three names on his bounty list. Schultz is morally repulsed by slavery, and takes an immediate liking to Django. When he sees that Django is also an excellent shot (“Fastest gun in the South,” Schultz dubs him), he makes him a deal: If Django helps Schultz kill the rest of the names on his bounty list, he’ll help Django penetrate the Mississippi Candyland Plantation where his beloved wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) is enslaved.

The first half of the film is a spirited buddy pic of sorts, as Schultz and Django travel the countryside, killing bad guys in all sorts of rococo ways, cheating death, and slowly bonding. Both Waltz and Foxx are brilliant—Foxx gives Django a steely dignity, a righteous reservoir of anger, and the tiniest bit of irony behind his watchful eyes. And Waltz should put up a shrine to Tarantino in his home (if he doesn’t have one already). For the second film in a row, Tarantino has generously given him a scene stealing role and the actor clearly relishes the task—wearing Schultz’s intellectual superiority with the same gusto and flourish that he wears his enormous fur coat.

In the film’s second half, this unlikely duo arrives at Candyland, meets both the loathsome plantation owner Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his house slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), and plots to rescue Broomhilda.

DiCaprio finds all sorts of disturbing grace notes—a tendency to infantilize himself, for one—in his role as the hedonistic, preening Candie, a man who thinks he’s refined but is, in fact, a boorish monster. But in a way, Jackson gives the bravest performance in the film. His Stephen is both dutifully loyal to his bratty boss and consumed with self-loathing (his jealousy over Django’s freedom manifests as suspicion and seething resentment). Jackson goes deep inside the conflicted mind of a so-called “Uncle Tom.” It’s riveting.

Alas, the film’s coda is overlong and unnecessarily bloody. For all his brilliance, I do wish that Tarantino was capable of showing some restraint. There’s a horrible scene of bare knuckled fighting to the death that I had to look away from (unfortunately, the soundwas possibly worse than the visuals). Later, a slave—named D’Artagnan by the pretentious Candie (even though he has never read a word of Dumas and doesn’t speak a lick of French)—is ordered to be mauled to death by dogs.

As I watched, I thought: We don’t need to see the mauling. Just the disgusted look on Schultz’s face; the seething fury in Django’s eyes would be more than enough. In fact, they might be more effective. But that’s not Tarantino’s style. He’ll show us the dog mauling every single time.

With Tarantino, you’ve got to take the good excesses with the bad ones. In the end, it’s more than worth it.