Brad Pitt finds his inner George C. Scott in 'War Machine'

In another day and age, a wartime picture starring Brad Pitt as a larger-than-life military leader might have been box office catnip. But, with the exception of a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles, Pitt's new movie,

War Machine

, has gone straight to Netflix. It began streaming Friday.

To some, that's an indication of a grievous slide in moviegoing culture - the reason the Netflix logo was roundly booed when it appeared on screens at this year's Cannes Film Festival - but, in this case, it feels like right-sizing.

War Machine is an intriguing, thoughtful, ungainly, sometimes fatally awkward tonal mash-up that takes a notorious real-life story as its inspiration and delivers a weirdly kaleidoscopic version of history that feels at once recent, ancient, and of the moment. It's neither satire nor straitlaced battle picture, landing in an uneasy no-man's-land that, ultimately, feels squeamishly on-point for the present time.

Pitt plays Gen. Glen McMahon, who, as the movie opens, has been sent to Afghanistan in 2009 as commander of U.S. and coalition forces. After success in Iraq, he's that he can, as he puts it, "win this thing," finally getting the United States out of what's devolved into an intractable quagmire. Bent, slightly bowlegged, his hair dyed platinum blond, Pitt channels a man who was already a towering figure when he arrived in Kabul, known for running seven miles before breakfast and surviving on one meal and four hours of sleep a day.

That might ring a bell for some viewers: McMahon is loosely based on Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose career came to an ignominious halt after reporter Michael Hastings wrote a revealing Rolling Stone profile of the general and his closest loyalists in 2010. Inspired by Hastings' book The Operators, writer-director David Michod has crafted War Machine as both a parody and a somber reflection on the hubris, self-deception, and futility of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, creating a parallel world that feels both stylized and - as the Trump administration contemplates another troop surge in the region - queasily prescient.

War Machine includes thinly veiled versions of civilian leaders such as Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and Richard Holbrooke. Ben Kingsley delivers an over-the-top rendition of a spaced-out (but sometimes amusingly perceptive) Hamid Karzai. Anthony Michael Hall plays McMahon's most trusted intelligence adviser, Greg Pulver, clearly based on the now-embattled Michael Flynn, whose animus during the 2016 presidential campaign is anticipated by the character's dismissive comments about then-President Obama.