Movie reviews: Rush

“Happiness is the enemy,” says Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) during Rush (15A), and you fear that Ron Howard’s movie about the rivalry between 1970s Formula 1 stars Lauda and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is going to descend into simplistic tale of Hunt’s cavalier flair triumphing over Lauda’s dour efficiency.

Set for the most part in 1976, the movie opens some years earlier, when we meet the feckless, womanising Hunt, a man who lives his personal live with all the death-defying abandon with which he pilots his Formula 3 cars.

Lauda, by contrast, takes to motor-racing because he isn’t capable of doing anything else well; he adopts a rigidly professional approach, playing the percentages and the angles and taking no unnecessary chances. Three years later, with their rivalry at a white-hot intensity, the pair are neck-and-neck at the top of the Formula 1 leader board when tragedy strikes. It’s a pulsating tale, not least because the cars — gloriously ramshackle by today’s standards, and described at one point as ‘bombs on wheels’ — are capable of 170 mph, a fact driven home by Anthony Dod Mantle’s superbly kinetic cinematography. Where the film truly succeeds is away from the racetrack, when Ron Howard explores the reasons why the rivals are equally brilliant in their individually idiosyncratic ways.