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Brad Pitt has become Hollywood’s hero in a can, a reliable star who can be called upon to improve any story, like a pantry staple bolstering a weak stew.

His most celebrated roles of recent years have him literally occupying various forms of metal containers: the tank in the Second World War drama “Fury,” the spaceship in “Ad Astra,” the rail vehicle in “Bullet Train” and the trailer in “Once Upon Time in Hollywood.”

Once again, Pitt’s services are sorely needed and obligingly supplied in “F1 The Movie,” which plunks him into a vroom-vroom car and a story as messy as a kid’s toy box.

The film is more like an extended ad for Formula One racing — and innumerable product placements — than it is narrative drama. But “F1” is a Jerry Bruckheimer-produced summer blockbuster directed by “Top Gun: Maverick” helmer Joseph Kosinski. We know going in that it’s about dazzling the eyes rather than the brain.

���������������� “F1” is mostly an enjoyable experience, especially when viewed on an IMAX screen — practically mandatory with a film like this. With a running time exceeding 2-1/2 hours, though, your eyes and brain are both likely to feel the burn.

What spark “F1” supplies is mainly from Pitt, who at 61 retains the boyish charisma and mischief he displayed 34 years ago this summer in “Thelma & Louise,” his breakthrough role in which he literally charmed the pants off Geena Davis’s Thelma before making off with her life savings.

The current film finds Pitt inhabiting multiple tin cans: the decrepit trailer his character, Sonny Hayes, lives in and the many thundering cars he races as a driver for hire on the competitive rubber-burning circuit.

Sonny is less the ghost of Formula One past than its sad ex-flame. He was callously kicked to the curb (or so it seems) after suffering a near-fatal raceway crash some 30 years ago in a showdown with Formula One legend Ayrton Senna (a real-world champion who died in a 1994 crash).

Known to racing fans as “the greatest that never was,” a phrase that clings to him like an oil smear, Sonny has spent the intervening decades chasing women, gambling and driving a taxi in New York City.

More recently, he’s been toiling as a road warrior for hire, drifting from one racing competition to the next. He’s still able to dazzle on occasion, as we see early on in a win at the Daytona International Speedway, using a combination of guts, guile and experience.

He’s very much the lone wolf, available when needed and content to quietly celebrate wins with a slice of diner pie and ice cream rather than hoisting a trophy or waving a cheque: “It’s not about the money,” he keeps saying. But he’s never won an F1 race, the prize he cares about most.

One day Sonny’s past comes knocking in the person of former teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem). Ruben is now the proprietor of a Formula One team that seems bent on guzzling cash rather than racing fuel. His APXGP crew keep losing races thanks to “s — tbox” cars and undisciplined drivers, a situation the implausibly calm Ruben wants and needs to correct, pronto.

Ruben offers Sonny the proverbial last chance at Formula One greatness, driving for APXGP as a member of a team that includes promising rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), whose talent is matched only by his impudence, and who has barely even heard of Sonny and his long-ago exploits.

Ruben wants Sonny to be both a teammate and mentor to Joshua, who doesn’t want the help from someone he contemptuously dismisses as “elderly.” Tech-averse Sonny, who prefers to train with long runs and ice baths rather than video race visualizations, doesn’t even post to social media, which Joshua does to great fanfare.

It’s a tantalizing pairing of two similar but clashing personalities — Sonny even has a smirking hot dog tattooed on his chest, attesting to his own showboating ways — and Kosinski and screenwriter Ehren Kruger thankfully don’t waste our time watching Sonny wrestle with Ruben’s proposal.

Before you know it, Sonny isstrutting across the asphalt, doing the slo-mo walk towards his new team. The scene recalls Tom Cruise’s stride in “Top Gun: Maverick,” of course, but also that moment in “Bull Durham” when Kevin Costner arrives as the “player to be named later” to school an unruly pitching ace played by Tim Robbins.

But the film fails to fully capitalize on the combustible pairing of Sonny and Joshua, as it zooms around the globe to a seemingly endless series of races in Italy, the U.K., Belgium, Las Vegas and finally Abu Dhabi. (I nearly cheered when “The Last Race” appeared as a text note.)

Kosinski and Bruckheimer really want us to know how much effort and money went into making “F1” look as convincing as possible — many real-world races, drivers and organizations were involved in the project — and they don’t care about redundancy.

Bruckheimer even splashed out major moolah on acquiring Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and Queen’s “We Will Rock You” for the soundtrack, classic rock chestnuts that compete with a Hans Zimmer score that inventively combines orchestral and electronic sounds.

In each of “F1’s” many global contests, Sonny adopts the strategy of the wily iconoclast, recklessly breaking every rule and ignoring his support crew’s urgent instructions. Cinematographer Claudio Miranda puts us right inside the metal vessel, from flag drop to pit stop, feeling like we’re riding on the dashboard or Sonny’s shoulders.

Yet for all his bravado, Sonny paradoxically keeps counselling Joshua to exhibit “patience” in his own driving, lest he end up in a roadside crumble as Sonny once did.

���������������� You can guess how seriously Joshua listens, in a script so laden with clichés it’s as if screenwriter Kruger, a co-writer of “Top Gun: Maverick,” was working from a checklist of mandatory beats from better racing films like “Grand Prix,” “Le Mans” and Bruckheimer’s earlier “Days of Thunder,” the 1990 film that brought Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman together.

Kruger lards his screenplay with such familiar sports platitudes as “I need this” and “You’ve gotta believe” in a story that cares more about the quality of tires on Sonny’s cars than it does in character development. Most of the other drivers are just anonymous helmets behind windshields.��

But the film does have room for one other notable figure: Kerry Condon’s Kate McKenna, APXGP’s technical director, who designs cars that look like the Batmobile suddenly acquired Formula One aspirations.

Condon, who was so good at handling male bombast in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” credibly manages the difficult task of playing both Sonny’s tech guru and his inevitable love interest, never making the divide seem too hard to cross.

She’s also the star of the film’s best scene, a spontaneous poker game in which she prods Sonny and Joshua into revealing details of their past, such as how they were both left fatherless at a young age. The scene hints at the different, better movie “F1” could have been.

There’s undeniable pleasure, though, of getting lost in the film’s big-screen mayhem, in a season when popcorn, testosterone and racing fuel go together quite nicely.��