With a horrifying aviation disaster already on the books for 2025 and a series of scary near-misses much reported in recent weeks, 2025 is shaping up to be one of the most stress-inducing years for air travel since 1999, when some were haunted by more abstract fears of a Y2K computer bug causing planes to fall from the sky. As it happens, 1999 was also the year that the only contemporary big-studio movie focused principally on air traffic controllers was released. Not only did Pushing Tin offer a (fictional) peek into the lives of this high-stress job, it did so with the kind of four-star (as in movie stars, not critics’ ratings) wattage that seemed endemic to adult dramas of the period: John Cusack, Billy Bob Thornton, a young Cate Blanchett, and an even-younger Angelina Jolie make up the movie’s lopsided quartet of professional and personal rivalries. So how does Pushing Tin play 26 years later, with more eyes than ever on the job it profiles?

First and foremost, it gives lie to this presidential administration’s absurd intimations that these jobs are sometimes handed to unqualified applicants. It seems like one of the only things more stressful than working as an air-traffic controller would be working badly as an air-traffic controller; how would you even become an “unqualified” air-traffic controller? Unless, say, the industry was deregulated or privatized. Anyway, the whole point of Pushing Tin — as the movie explains, air-traffic controllers use this jargon to describe their job routing airplanes — is that some careers are so all-consumingly stressful that the only way to do them is attempt to achieve a kind of psychopathic hotshot zen, which in turn isn’t especially tenable.

That’s the best part of the movie: When it focuses on the rapid-fire confidence, focus, and bravado required (in this telling, at least) to master it, it’s absolutely fascinating. It also makes particularly good use of Cusack, a masterfully gabby actor in his prime. Here, a decade after his iconic work in Say Anything and just before he would revise that persona with the grown-up music geek of High Fidelity, he rides the line between charmingly eccentric and insistent egotist. As Nick, the resident king of the New York metro area “tower” (it’s not really a tower, as the controllers explain), he manages flights coming in and out of three different airports – until the arrival of an unsmiling, even steadier controller Russell (Billy Bob Thornton) throws off his game.

At first, this development smartly complicates the Cusack persona, like career highlights High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Blank. In a supermarket scene where he bumps into Russell’s standoffish young wife Mary (Angelina Jolie), he’s wearing a long coat and making facial expressions that, all together, make him look unnervingly like Lloyd Dobler, to more insidious ends: He’s laying on the sensitive-guy charm trying to win Mary over, talking about what an easy cry he is and making self-deprecating comments, weaponizing his boyishness to prove to himself that he can compete with Russell. Jolie gets a classic neo-screwball line aimed at Cusack after their characters do ill-advisedly sleep together:  “What are the fewest number of words you can use to get out that door?”

That takes us through about the first 40, 50 minutes of Pushing Tin, at which point it becomes clear that screenwriters Glen and Les Charles (co-creators of Cheers) are stretching a sitcom plot development thin. The lead character getting shaken by the emergence of a comically calm and “cool” new rival who beats him at his own game before he learns to chill is a sturdy plot for a 24-minute episode, but serves to yank Pushing Tin out of the control room and into the world of generic male one-upmanship. Worse, it marginalizes both Mary and Nick’s wife Connie (Cate Blanchett, really Doing the Accent) as pawns in the men’s game, which keeps Thornton’s character so opaque and mysterious that it’s really just Nick’s breakdown. How the two women actually feel about their respective husbands’ job (or even their flaws as people) becomes weirdly immaterial. The movie gets some mojo back in a later scene where Cusack and Thornton are alone running the tower during a bomb threat, fitting insults and recriminations in the tiny spaces between their torrents of flight-plan instructions, but the eventual self-help-y resolution is embarrassing. Respect to a movie rooted enough in the suburbs of New York City to have not one but two crucial scenes set in a local Italian joint, but also, that’s a lot of time to spend in an Italian restaurant for a movie that’s about air-traffic controllers.

Still, you can feel the touch of a strong studio hand like Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral; Donnie Brasco; one of the better Harry Potter movies; range!) in the very fact that this is a Fox movie about married adults with high-pressure but unglamorous jobs with four big-name stars, rather than an eight-episode single-season Hulu series you’ve never heard of. Does the lack of big-studio adult dramas (some of which flop, like this one did back in ’99) contribute, in its own way, to the decay of United States infrastructure?! Who can say? But it sure feels notable that this half-good, half-annoying movie — one that, it bears mentioning, gave us the extremely memorable (albeit short-lived) marriage between Billy Bob and Jolie —feels more curious about what this job entails than any of the DEI-blaming members of the current administration.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.