AKIRA

Thirty-one years after a mysterious explosion levels Tokyo and starts World War III, Neo-Tokyo has risen in its place — corrupt, overcrowded, and one bad decision away from falling apart again. Kaneda leads a small biker gang through it. His childhood friend Tetsuo rides with him, always a step behind, always resentful of it.

Then Tetsuo crashes into a child who isn't a child — one of a group of psychic test subjects the military has kept sedated for decades, survivors of whatever really caused the original blast. The crash wakes something in him. What follows is less a fight to save the city than a fight to understand what's happening to Tetsuo before there's no Tetsuo left to save.

It's a teenage-rage story wearing a sci-fi action film's clothes. Tetsuo's arc — a kid handed more power than his body or his ego can hold, and the people around him scrambling to control the fallout — reads as clearly as an allegory for adolescence, addiction, or nuclear anxiety as it does a straightforward plot.

Otomo refuses to soften any of it with exposition. Characters, factions, and political motives are dropped into scenes with no hand-holding. You keep up, or you watch it again — and the film is confident enough in its own world that most people do the second thing.