No, not the village in north County Dublin, but the new film from director Ron Howard and writer Peter Morgan, which chronicles the rivalry between seventies F1 superstars James Hunt and Niki Lauda. Although it dips further back into the past, it's largely concerned with the incidents and tales of the 1976 Formula One season in which both men fought it out for title, right down to the final round.
And, just as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy isn't about spying (it's about betrayal and age) and Jaws isn't about a shark (it's about facing your fears) so Rush isn't really about Formula One. It's really about whether what you do in life is worth the cost, and whether or not how you do it makes a difference. Should you be like Niki Lauda - cold and calculating (or is he?), but hugely successful - or James Hunt - boorish and laddish but clearly having more fun than anyone else on the planet (or is he?).
Peter Morgan has been here before, in both his screenplays for The Queen (Helen Mirren's dutiful, cold Elizabeth II versus Tony Blair's anxious, publicity-minded politician) and Frost/Nixon (David Frost's playful chat show host versus Richard Nixon's exiled political monster). For Rush, the disparate characters of Lauda and Hunt seem to be tailor-made for such a face-off, but Morgan and Howard have taken some dramatic liberties with the real-life relationship between the two men. In fact, Lauda and Hunt were good friends, sharing trips across Europe in their junior formulae days and sharing a flat in London at one point. To make them antagonists is to throw away what was actually a warm historical friendship, but the closely kept-to tenants of Hollywood film-making dictate a good guy and a bad guy, so here we are.
Rather surprisingly, it's the cold and efficient Lauda that emerges as more of the good guy, and the seemingly carefree Hunt who ends up as more of wastrel than a winner. German actor Daniel Bruhl has so perfectly captured Niki Lauda's mannerisms and voice that, in the manner of Daniel Day Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln last year, you actually forget that it's an actor playing a part. Getting an audience to warm to a standoffish, internalised character isn't easy but Bruhl's performance, allied to regular bursts of Lauda's trademark caustic wit, soon have you cheering him on.
By contrast, Chris Hemsworth's performance as James Hunt falls a little flat. The Thor actor is a reasonable physical match for Hunt (albeit lacking, for me, the real Hunt's twinkly charm) but the need to find psychological depth to Hunt's drinking, drugging and womanising (all historically accurate) leave him playing a character that's just too damned hard to like. True enough, both Murray Walker and Nigel Roebuck will confirm that Hunt's natural charm and friendliness didn't truly emerge until after he had retired, and the pressure of competition was off, but it's hard to root for someone being played as so obviously self-destructive.
If anything, the real star of the show here is neither Bruhl nor Hemsworth but Anthony Dod Mantle. Mantle is usually the cinematographer of choice for Danny Boyle and there are more than a few shots in Rush that could easily have been lifted from Trainspotting or Trance, if Trainspotting had featured a McLaren M23 instead of Ewan McGregor. The changes of lenses, the shots on seventies film stock, the digital effects, all lift Formula One onto the screen with a colour and a sense of visual shock that hasn't been seen for a while. The decision to use the real cars as much as possible in filming pays off, big time, and both Mantle and Howard go to incredible lengths, both practical and digital, to put you not only in the car but also in the engine, in the grandstand and even in the helmet.
My only complaint is that all the stylised shots and all the clever camera trickery can act as a distancing device. Too often I felt taken back out of the plot because of flashy, clever shots of the cars in motion. Rush paints F1 in glorious colour on the big screen, but it can't match the gripping veracity of John Frankenheimer's 1966 Grand Prix. (Car nut note: Rush's production design team have gone to extraordinary, and largely successful, lengths, to recreate seventies F1 on modern circuits, but if you know Brands Hatch as well as I do, you'll spot it a few too many times.)
Still, Howard's skill as a director is very much to the fore here, and once again, just as he did with Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon, he wrings proper dramatic tension from events to which you already know the ending. In particular, the events leading up to, during and following Lauda's fiery crash at the Nürburgring (plot spoiler?) are played to such heartfelt and occasionally gruesome effect that it's at this stage of the film where Bruhl's Lauda emerges as the piece's true hero.
So a brusque, calculating Austrian rat-a-like emerges as a more appealing screen presence than a handsome, sexy playboy acted by a man whose day job is (successfully) portraying a Norse god? Afraid so, yes. It's the flashes of humanity, wit and affection that emerge from behind Lauda's cool (later scarred) exterior that turn Rush from a been-there-seen-it sports biopic into a film with characters you genuinely care about. That, not the painstakingly recreated racing scenes nor the platoon of pricelessly original four-wheeled (six-wheeled in the case of the Tyrell P34s) co-stars are why you should go and see Rush.
Above all, this is a film about danger. Seventies F1 was staggeringly deadly and both Lauda and Hunt were lucky to escape with their lives, if in Lauda's case not his face, intact. That they did so while pursuing such wildly different personal and professional courses is what gives Rush such headline-gathering drama. But it's Bruhl's performance as Lauda, and how he faced up to the consequences of such danger, that keeps you in your seat to the end.