Fourteen years is a long time to wait. Tony Gilroy, the writer-director behind Michael Clayton and the creative force that elevated Andor into prestige television, has not directed a feature since 2012’s The Bourne Legacy. His return, Behemoth!, premiered October 2 as the centerpiece of the 64th New York Film Festival, and it was worth every year of the wait.

Searchlight Pictures opens the film theatrically on December 4, right in the heart of awards season. After watching the first reactions roll in from the NYFF premiere, that placement makes perfect sense. This is a film built for the season: a grown-up drama about music, family, and the people who make the movies sing.

A cellist’s homecoming

Pedro Pascal stars as Alex Serian, a renowned cellist and third-generation Hollywood studio musician who returns to Los Angeles to compose film scores and celebrate the artists who create them. Set against the world of music and movies, the story follows Alex as he confronts a fractured family history, a possible daughter he never knew, and the question of where he truly belongs.

Pascal stepped into the role after Oscar Isaac exited due to scheduling, and by all accounts, he made it his own. He described the script as a puzzle and threw himself into preparation with characteristic intensity. “The cello was the main character of my life for several weeks leading up to shooting,” he said. “I took it with me everywhere.” That commitment shows. The first reactions out of NYFF single out his performance as mesmerizing, the kind of lived-in, fully embodied work that reminds you why he became one of the most in-demand actors on the planet.

The ensemble around him is superb. Olivia Wilde plays Carol, a wealthy patron from Alex’s past. Eva Victor is Nadia, his old flame and fellow cellist. Will Arnett plays Alex’s brother Andy, in scenes reshot after David Harbour departed the project. Hank Azaria is Alex’s father Peter, JoBeth Williams his mother Ginnie, with Alexa Swinton as the 15-year-old pop prodigy who may be Alex’s daughter. It is a deep bench, and Gilroy gives everyone a moment to shine.

The music is the movie

Here is the boldest thing about Behemoth!: the score was written by nine of the most celebrated film composers alive. The Behemoth! Collective includes Michael Giacchino, James Newton Howard, Michael Abels, Emily Bear, Lukas Frank, Henry Jackman, Nami Melumad, Brandon Roberts, and Alan Silvestri. They wrote the scores for the fictional films Alex works on within the story. Then 303 AFM musicians in Los Angeles performed the on-screen musical sequences.

Read that again. Nine Oscar-caliber composers. Three hundred musicians. For a drama about a cellist.

It pays off enormously. Every review out of the festival, even the mixed ones, agrees the music is outstanding. The film is structured like a piece of music itself, intercutting present-day scoring sessions with flashbacks across Chicago, Dallas, and Los Angeles. Some critics found the time-jumping fussy. But when the music swells and Pascal is lost in a performance, the structure stops mattering. You feel it instead of following it.

Gilroy’s patient craft

What is most striking about Behemoth! is how unhurried it feels. At 124 minutes, Gilroy lets scenes breathe. He trusts his actors’ faces. He trusts the music. This is the work of a filmmaker who spent a decade and a half writing some of the most precise dialogue in television and came back to cinema with something to say about the people behind the curtain.

At the film’s press conference, Gilroy said he had “never wrote a character quite like this before.” You can feel that discovery in every scene. Alex Serian is not a hero or an antihero. He is a working musician, gifted and flawed, trying to make peace with his past while the orchestra tunes up around him. It is the kind of character the movies do not make enough of anymore.

The film also serves as a love letter to an invisible workforce. Session musicians are the unsung heroes of Hollywood, playing on scores heard by billions without ever being seen. Behemoth! puts them center stage, and the tribute lands because it comes from a filmmaker who clearly reveres the craft.

The verdict

Behemoth! is a warm, beautifully acted, musically glorious return for one of Hollywood’s finest filmmakers. Pascal delivers one of the best performances of his career, the score is a once-in-a-generation achievement, and Gilroy directs with the confidence of a man who waited until he had something worth saying.

Could the structure be tighter? Perhaps. But films this humane, this well-crafted, and this full of love for their subject do not come along often. When it opens December 4, go hear it in a theater with good sound. Your ears will thank you.

For more on this year’s prestige slate, read our take on Sorkin’s awards-season drama The Social Reckoning and Michelle Yeoh’s TIFF triumph in The Surgeon. And for a very different kind of December release, Johnny Depp’s haunted Ebenezer arrives just in time for the holidays.