The performances, whether from novices like the sensational Lane or professionals like LaBeouf, Keough, and Patton, are at once naturalistic and emotionally precise.

The show is masterful in eliciting a range of feelings – a combination of joy and horror, tension and relief – but none more so than surprise.

A serious, substantial piece of work.

This is a wildly over-the-top but thoroughly entertaining soap opera, and it works because it follows the same philosophy Bobby does: If you want to succeed, you don’t have to be the smartest one in the room. You just have to be shameless.

Still, the movie’s mores can feel cluelessly retro as the ever-dithering Bridget lurches between one man and another.

Crisply photographed, thoughtfully acted and often refreshingly amusing, “Civil War” injects doses of much-needed fun into a genre of filmmaking that’s become mired in dour pretentiousness, when it’s not ridiculing its own excesses in such meta-snark exercises as “Deadpool.”