Starring Gael García Bernal. In Spanish, with English subtitles. Rated PG

From the director of Jackie comes another trip back in the time machine, this time to director Pablo Larraín’s native Chile, where Nobel Prize–winning poet Pablo Neruda lived and died—but that end came long after the material covered by this timely and surprisingly playful look at how art can triumph in a would-be terror state.

Neruda joins its bald, rotund, and deeply hedonistic poet turned senator’s story in 1948. That’s when the new Chilean president turned against the leftists in his own coalition. Veteran TV comic Luis Gnecco plays it mostly straight as the famous poet, whose patrician use of language meshed with a common touch that endeared him to peasants, intellectuals, and all kinds of rebels in the Spanish-speaking world.

The movie downplays Neruda’s stubborn Stalinism, in favour of what you might call a melancholy affirmation of life; politics is merely his nagging responsible side! The script by Guillermo Calderón, who also wrote Larraín’s scabrous The Club and the similarly themed Violeta Went to Heaven (about tragic singer Violeta Parra), doesn’t traffic in the usual biopic tropes.

Instead, the story is narrated by a figure right out of Neruda: an unctuous police inspector called Oscar Peluchonneau, played by Gael García Bernal as a mustachioed martinet dreamed up by someone who’s seen too many film-noir cops.

Described as “half moron, half idiot” by a Santiago politician, the clueless detective is sent on a wild chase across the country to follow the kind of fugitive who drops autographed books wherever he goes. Peluchonneau can’t quite hide his resentful admiration for the poet, whom he goes on the radio to condemn as “a public menace and unforgettable lover!” (In fact, there are at least two brothel scenes too many, and Neruda’s patient wife, played beautifully by Mercedes Morán, isn’t much of a character.)

The use of archaic rear projections in car scenes, beautifully disorienting lens flares, and thickly coloured filters throughout gradually heightens the movie’s graphic-novel qualities. As Chilean political thrillers go, it’s more Sin City than it is Missing.

The mix of visual spoofs, mind games, and classical music is hugely entertaining, even if the realities of an emerging police state aren’t ignored. (Future U.S.–backed dictator Augusto Pinochet shows up briefly, as a concentration-camp commandant.) Neruda neither sticks to nor rewrites history; it takes poetic licence to keep the muses out front.