Alejandro González Iñárritu’s ‘Digger’ has more than a touch of ‘Dr. Strangelove’ about it, while also functioning as a grotesque satire of Trump-era politics, corporate power and the uncanny ability of wealthy men to escape responsibility for the disasters they’ve created.

And then there’s Tom Cruise. Cruise normally likes to look youthful. Watching ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ at the cinema, I almost wondered whether they’d accidentally screened Tony Scott’s original, so little did he appear to have aged. Here, however, he’s virtually unrecognizable: wrinkles, a fat suit and tufts of unkempt white hair. It’s a most unflattering appearance for a star who has spent decades appearing almost supernaturally youthful.

He plays Digger, an oil tycoon whose philosophy seems to be drill, drill, drill – or perhaps dig, dig, dig. Unfortunately, his activities have apparently brought the world to the brink of an environmental catastrophe that could kill millions. John Goodman plays the American president, who arrives at Digger’s fortified retreat and effectively hands responsibility for saving humanity back to the man who helped endanger it.

It’s basically ‘Dr. Strangelove’ with an oil executive in charge. There’s even an elderly cat, apparently kept alive well beyond its natural lifespan, which seems as oblivious to the surrounding madness as its owner is to the consequences of his actions. It’s a wonderfully absurd detail in a film full of them.

But then Iñárritu pulls the rug from underneath us. What appears to be a moment of political reckoning turns out to involve an elaborate performance, with Digger apparently paying an actor to play a role in his own personal drama. Suddenly, we’re no longer entirely sure where reality ends and theatrical manipulation begins.

There’s also a peculiar episode involving Digger’s daughter on an aeroplane, which raises another question: when the performance threatens to collide with genuine personal danger, does he abandon the show or simply carry on?

Cruise is particularly effective at playing a man who cannot imagine any situation in which he isn’t the most important person present. And this culminates in a barnstorming speech to an international gathering, reminiscent of Cruise’s over the top verbal performance in ‘Magnolia’. With his reputation and perhaps the future of humanity at stake, Digger somehow manages to persuade his audience that the very philosophy responsible for the catastrophe is also the answer to it. He makes drilling sound like salvation.

It’s a magnificent exercise in self-promotion, and an unsettling reminder that the ability to tell a convincing story can sometimes matter more than the truth of what’s actually happened. That’s really the film’s central preoccupation. Digger doesn’t necessarily need to solve the crisis. He needs to control the narrative surrounding it.

And Iñárritu plays a similar game with us. The film contains two substantial twists, including one right at the end that changes our understanding of much of what we’ve previously watched. It’s outrageous, indulgent and frequently ridiculous, but deliberately so. Like ‘Dr. Strangelove’, it understands that when political power becomes sufficiently absurd, satire scarcely needs to exaggerate reality.

And Cruise’s willingness to make himself physically grotesque is part of the joke. Here is one of cinema’s most carefully maintained stars playing a man whose vanity is so immense that he scarcely notices his own absurdity.

Ultimately, ‘Digger’ is less concerned with whether humanity can survive an environmental catastrophe than with whether the people responsible can persuade us to applaud them. The man who creates the disaster doesn’t necessarily have to save the world. He just has to convince everybody that he’s the hero of the story.