Midnight in Paris harks back to 1920s Paris — and vintage Woody Allen

In the 1960s, Woody Allen published a humorous essay called “A Twenties Memory,” which spoofed the “lost generation” of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and their famed contemporaries: “I kidded Hemingway about his forthcoming novel and we laughed a lot and had fun and then we put on boxing gloves and he broke my nose.”

Nearly 50 years later, Allen rediscovers the pleasures of 1920s nostalgia, and apparently the joy of filmmaking itself, with Midnight in Paris. Allen’s happiest and most satisfying movie since 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway begins like a luminous travelogue of the City of Lights and builds to a frequently hilarious critique of over-romanticizing the good old days.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a self-described hack screenwriter visiting Paris with his superficial fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her parents. Gil struggles with writing a serious novel and fantasizes about moving to Paris instead of grinding out scripts in Southern California. As a couple, they seem a poor match even before Inez begins clubbing with an old flame (Michael Sheen in a devil beard) while Gil wanders the streets at night.

While lost and tipsy, Gil accepts an invitation into a vintage Peugeot, which drops him off at a party marked by flapper-era clothes and music. He watches a dapper pianist (Yves Heck) crooning “Let’s Do It” with such wit and charm, Gil gradually realized the guy isn’t just singing Cole Porter, but is Cole Porter. Gil swiftly falls into the orbit of such legendary bon vivants as Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Thor’s Tom Hiddleston), and becomes smitten with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), an artist’s model and lover to the likes of Picasso.

Allen clearly shares Gil’s affection for the era of champagne, cafés and new artistic styles, but gently satirizes it as well. As Hemingway, Corey Stoll makes hilariously serious pronouncements in the author’s trademark clipped prose about The Real and The True. Gil discusses his predicament with a trio of famous surrealists, who find nothing peculiar about a man traveling in time.

Like many actors playing the leads in Woody Allen movies, Wilson stammers one-liners and interrupts himself, without managing to sound like he’s doing a Woody impression. Wilson speeds up his natural cadence a little, but never seems to be straining, and amusingly captures Gil’s moonstruck befuddlement.

Allen suppresses most of his bad storytelling habits with Midnight in Paris, although he still tends to overexplain some of his themes. Gil delivers more speeches than necessary about his creative difficulties, while Inez comes across as so unsupportive and condescending, she might as well be a bad spouse from a Tyler Perry movie. But just when you think you know where Midnight in Paris is headed, Allen takes some surprising turns, finding more clever implications than you expect from the premise. Adriana, for instance, ends up being a more complex character than simply a male fantasy out of art history.

The 75-year-old filmmaker and funnyman has been a lover of Manhattan all his life, but lately he’s been having some passionate flings with other cities, to judge from films such as London’s Match Point and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. He’s no less infatuated with Paris, but in Midnight he reveals maturity and self-awareness about the risks of perceiving people, places and even other time periods as being more than they actually are. Midnight in Paris suggests that in the future, some people might even look back on today as part of a long-lost Golden Age.