“The Brutalist” is a brutally smart drama for a brutally stupid age.

Brady Corbet’s American saga touches on everything from classism and racism to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust as its hero staggers along the jagged edge of American capitalism as he faces the white supremacism of the privileged rich.

The “American Dream” is as upended as the immigrant title character’s first view of the Statue of Liberty when arrives from Europe. Whatever László Tóth hopes this new world will be, whatever promise the myth of America makes to those who would come, it’s not just the “Land of Opportunity.” It’s a land that tolerates poverty and discriminates against many of the ablest and most talented, just because that’s what the rich elites desire — attitudes unchallenged, a status quo that protects them from all comers.

The central metaphor here comes from the school of architecture known as brutalism — rough, imposing forms that took the icy beauty of Bauhaus School design to a logical endgame — harsh, unvarnished reality commenting on boxy functionality and “efficiency.”

We meet László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he is fleeing postwar Europe to America, where he doesn’t take the symbolic, jostled upside-down view (from steerage) vision of The Statue of Liberty as a warning.

He is a Hungarian Jew, “forcibly separated” from his wife by the Nazi Holocaust, eager to put the horrors of Europe behind him. A cousin (Alessandro Nivola) has sponsored him and summoned him to his Philadelphia furniture business. Attila has wisely changed his name to “Miller” for his “Miller & Sons” (there are no sons) business, married a Catholic “shiksa” and become Catholic himself.

Toth, “a trained and licensed (in Hungary) architect” will design and build furniture for Miller & Sons. He will give customers the “ugly” tables and chairs they want, which Attila makes to order. But Toth will also design sleek, minimalist bent-tube tables and chairs and play a part in launching the “mid century modern movement,” or so we gather.

The son (Joe Alwyn) of a rich client commissions a “study” makeover in entrepreneur Harrison Lee Van Buren’s (Guy Pearce) beaux art mansion on his suburban estate. Toth produces something radical and stunning and not at all appreciated by Van Buren Senior. The rich refuse to pay, as they often do.

Toth is ruined, kicked out by the cousin and forced into manual labor until that “American Dream” moment when Look Magazine does a pictorial of the mansion and Toth’s domed library creates a sensation.

Van Buren, a man who finds Toth’s aesthetic, his world weariness and cynicism “stimulating conversation,” and so he changes his life. Van Burn will “nurture one of the defining talents of our epoch.” Toth will design a vast suburban civic center honoring Van Buren’s late mother. It will be a hilltop landmark with a brutalist message for America.

We’ve heard, from the film’s beginning, the plaintive pleas of Toth’s wife (Felicity Jones), who has survived the camps and is taking care of his young niece, in (Hungarian, with subtitles) voiced-over letters. Years pass as the building project starts, and eventually the rich man commissions his Jewish lawyer to expedite Erzsébet Tóth’s immigration.

Once there, Laszlo’s indiscretions with prostitutes cease, but not the heroin injections he takes for the pain of his injuries in Europe, physical and psychic.

We’ve seen him lose any rose-colored glasses-view of America in Toth’s recognizing the poverty and racism (Isaach De Bankolé plays a single-dad he meets in a soup line) in a land of opulent wealth and selective, capricious charity by the filthy rich. Erzsébet, an Oxford-educated journalist in The Old Country, reinforces this view even as László is plainly less thrilled to see her than she is him.

The Toths will be tested as a grand, stark edifice rises on a hill in Doylestown in wealthy Bucks County in “Pennsylvania,” a state of steel and microcosm of America as a newsreel frequently-sampled in the film reminds us, “the land of decision.”

“The Brutalist” is a brilliant showcase for two of the cinema’s most quixotic, maverick actors, the Oscar-winner Brody and the mercurial Pearce. It’s been fascinating to watch Brody carve his own path in a business that edited him out of his first “big break” (“The Thin Red Line”) only to give him a most-deserved Oscar for “The Pianist.” His eccentric — perhaps by necessity — choices of horror, indie films few would see and the like, has been matched by Pearce’s more troubled (self-admitted addictions) path from “Memento” and “Priscilla: Queen of the Desert” through occasional roles in big budget pictures and decades in the indie wildneress.

They are well-matched antagonists here, with one wishing Pearce had more screen time despite the instantly cruel impression his nouveau riche character makes — acquired snobbery and classism folded into lifelong racism and anti-Semitism.

Jones has the smaller role, making a fierce impression in just a few scenes, with other female supporting players either appearing as victims or WASPy opportunists.

In cinematic shorthand, “The Brutalist” is that remake of Ayn Rand’s architecture as creative freedom epic “The Fountainhead” that aspiring architect Brad Pitt never made grafted onto Paul Mazursky’s Holocaust melodrama “Enemies, A Love Story.”

The perspective of shellshocked and traumatized Holocaust survivors seeing the non-Jewish world for what it really is by what they’ve done to or allowed to happen to a long-reviled minority is balanced against radio and newsreel coverage of the founding of Israel, treated as a backdrop here.

The traditional sentimental cinematic view of that event, as seen in generations of Hollywood films — from “Cast a Giant Shadow” and “Exodos” to the recent “Golda” — is soberly upended in this ironic comment by actor turned co-writer/director Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”). A Jewish state founded by and for Holocaust survivors eventually commits its own apartheid and genocide.

Attila may “assimilate” and erase his Jewishness to succeed in racist and still anti-Semitic America. László never will, maintaining his synagogue attendance, never hiding his Jewishness, refusing “a doctor who can fix” his broken, and it is implied, “Jewish” nose.

The title character’s name was inspired by the Hungarian geologist who attacked a famous Michelangelo statue in the ’70s, challenging dearly-held cultural assumptions and the ever-changing definition of “art.” That name also inspired satirist Don Novello’s dim-witted conservative letter writer of the ’70s, “Lazlo Toth, American,” writing the ironic, nonsensical “Lazlo Letters” to famous figures and institutions of the day.

That’s worth pointing out because “The Brutalist” is a movie very much of its moment aesthetically and politically. The “beauty” Toth sees in his austere/severe designs is utterly objective. And there’s an unblinking “This is the way America really is” message here — unjust, unfair, and as unequal as that Goethe quote that opens the picture implies.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”

Yes, this film is more grandiose than grand. Long, revealing anecdotes and pauses and setbacks drawn out and changes of scene and point of view suggest there’s room for editing — a lot of it. And for all this patience, detail and artful treatment of confrontations, conversations, crises and the like — jumpy, nervous, hand-held camera work and extreme closeups, mesmerizing hood-ornament-view drives along lonely roads — don’t adequately prepare us for the third act’s biggest shock.

And no, you don’t need to see this in IMAX (I did). That’s just another way the distributor indulges the “epic” minded (“filmed in VistaVision”) director, who gave little hint of such talent before this effort.

But you’d be hard-pressed to think of a motion picture parable that more perfectly fits its moment and the mood of the country and the world it premiered into. Corbet has tapped into the zeitgeist as well as The American Myth and made a movie that makes you wince because he, like László Tóth, refused to sentimentalize it or avert his eyes from the ugliness.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity, smoking, profanity

Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Stacy Martin, Joe Alwyn, Isaach De Bankolé and Alessandro Nivola.

Credits: Directed by Brady Corbet, scripted by Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. An A24 release.

Running time: 3:32