“Asteroid City” is the filmWes Andersonhas been trying to make for 20 years.

The purest distillation of what this director brings to cinema, it’s beautiful to look at, surreal, nostalgic and funny in a weird, distanced way. It feels as ifAndersonis making up the movie as he goes along, like he has no idea where he’s heading from one scene to the next. Normally, that would lead a director into self-indulgence, but Anderson finds a way to make every scene interesting — and he gets in and out of the movie in a tight 104 minutes. That’s including credits.

To be clear, Anderson does offer a story, but there isn’t much of one, and the movie’s blank, tongue-in-cheek affect works to keep viewers at a remove, anyway. This is audacious filmmaking, because he’s gambling that he can keep audiences entertained while employing none of the usual dramatic tools.

Anderson’s lone indulgence is to cast famous faces in extremely minor roles. I’m not talking about the main ensemble here —Scarlett Johansson,Tom Hanks, Jason Schwartzman — but aboutJeff Goldblum一行,或马特·狄龙,他只有一个吗small scene and spends the rest of the movie standing around. This is distracting, and Anderson certainly does it as another distancing device, reminding audiences that this is all artifice, that it’s only a movie. But when you see major stars sidelined and almost humbled, it’s hard not to see their casting as the director’s ego trip, his showing off as to how many big-name actors are willing to take any role in one of his movies.

“Asteroid City,” set in 1955, is told as a story within a story, beginning in black and white, with Bryan Cranston as a Rod Serling-like TV host introducing a writer (Edward Norton) and a series of actors who will take part in his drama. After that introduction, the movie switches to color and to its setting, Asteroid City, a town of 80 people at the intersection of Nevada, California and Arizona.

The town looks like nothing ever seen in life or onscreen. The color palette is mostly clay-colored, orange, turquoise and sky blue, in deeply saturated pastels that are lovely to the eye. Anderson savors our introduction to the city, employing a 360-degree pan so that we can take it all in.

Schwartzman plays a widower taking his boy and three little girls to live at the house of his father-in-law (Hanks). His car breaks down in Asteroid City, where a stargazing event is about to happen. Thus, we have people converging on this tiny town, including Johansson as a movie star whose daughter is taking part in a science competition.

“Asteroid City” could be described as a comedy, but not in which things are hilarious. Instead, the humor here comes from what is amusingly odd. Schwartzman, who is particularly adept at walking Anderson’s strange tonal line, has a scene in which he tells his kids that their mother is dead. He picks up a Tupperware container of her ashes and partly opens the lid to show them, and that gesture is emblematic of the movie: bizarre, knowingly comic and yet endearingly human.

Eventually, there’s a plot touching vaguely on space aliens, but the meaning of “Asteroid City” can’t be explained in terms of its events. Its meaning has more to do with its mood, with its strange humor, its attention to visual detail, its quality of sadness and acceptance.

Often the most exalted of filmmakers — like Terrence Malick,Ingmar BergmanandAlfred Hitchcock— have the ability to communicate their consciousness, so that you get the feeling that you’re inside their head, or they’re inside yours. Anderson has come close to doing that before, but this time he really does it.

For that reason, “Asteroid City” is his best movie.

Reach Mick LaSalle: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com