Japan, like so many developed democracies, is undergoing a slow-burn crisis of national identity. The far-right has been on the rise for years. Anti-immigrant sentiment is surging. The population crisis has created an inverted demographic triangle that keeps the elderly working indefinitely while simultaneously disenfranchising the young.

Taken together, one can’t help but hear a ghostly refrain: What is Japan, amid all of this? What was it once, and what could it be, in the future?

These questions are taken up with remarkable elegance by director Lee Sang-il in Kokuho, a stunning period drama set in the world of Kabuki theater, based on a 2018 novel by Shuichi Yoshida. It’s also the highest-grossing live action Japanese film of all time. Though it wasn’t exactly made on a shoestring budget, Kokuho’s popularity seems driven less by marketing spectacle than word-of-mouth raves, drawing everyone from Gen Z streaming natives to elderly viewers who hadn’t set foot in a theater in years.

While Kokuho is beautiful and superbly acted, there’s obviously something deeper that drew audiences to this movie. In my view, it is this very question of identity—a reflection of the contemporary Japanese mood—that makes Kokuho so compelling. It is a meditation on how a nation conceives of itself, told through the lives of two very different young men, trying to win a sense of self against the backdrop of a shape-shifting nation.

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The film’s plot is simple enough. Set 1960s Japan, it follows Kikuo, heir to a Nagasaki yakuza clan, who loses everything after his father’s murder. Having caught the eye of Hanjiro Hanai, the head of a Kabuki household in Osaka, Kikuo leaves Nagasaki and moves in with the Hanai family, training under Hanjiro to become a Kabuki actor. Hanjiro also has his own heir—a son named Shunsuke—who quickly becomes Kikuo’s best friend and rival. What unfolds is a decades-long drama of succession among adopted brothers, as Kikuo and Shunsuke vie for Hanjiro’s approval and the love of the wider, Kabuki-going public.

This tension—between insider and outsider, between legacy heir and newcomer—has obvious parallels to Japan’s own dilemma of whether to embrace change as a nation or cling to tradition.

Yet Kokuho offers depth and humanity to both Kikuo (the underdog with a tainted yakuza past) and Shunuke (the Kabuki family princeling). Each has their own reasons for wanting to excel in the Kabuki tradition; each has their own flaws and failures. It’s no wonder that this film spoke to all ages; it offered an empathetic portrayal of both a life dictated by tradition and a life dedicated to novelty, to breaking molds and stereotypes.

Consider how rare this is: Most films ultimately declare allegiance to the outsider or the insider. As a viewer, you’re made to root for the lovable underdog breaking into an established industry, a Cinderella who doesn’t know which fork to use but wins the heart of the prince all the same. Or else you’re cheering for the embattled protagonist, fighting to keep the family business intact against the nefarious meddling of a newcomer—the kind of character who represents unasked-for newness, an unwelcome break from the sanctity of tradition. Kokuho refuses this dichotomy. There is no cartoon villain standing in for change, no sentimental coronation of the underdog.

Though Lee has waved off identity-based readings of his work, I think it is precisely because of his background that he was able to make a film that so empathetically portrays the emotional landscape of the outsider and insider at once. Lee is a Zainichi Korean—ethnically Korean, born and raised in Japan, part of a group that has historically been excluded from full belonging. Zainichi communities emerged from forced migration during Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea and have been systemically mistreated, excluded, and oppressed. (For a sweeping fictional look into the Zainichi experience, I recommend Min Jin Lee’s critically acclaimed novel, Pachinko.)

Of course, it’s not just identity politics that’s driving people to the theater in record numbers. The film has an extraordinary, meticulous visual language, crafted by cinematographer Sofian El Fani (best known for his work on Blue Is the Warmest Colour). Together, he and Lee capture the subtle scenes of heartbreak, madness, and struggle with the same care as the vivid color and motion of Kabuki.

From its opening scene—a snowy yakuza New Year’s celebration in Nagasaki, rendered in blue-gray light against the opulence of the partygoers’ kimonos—the movie is a visual feast. Warm interiors glow against encroaching darkness, a premonition of the violence to come. The costumes alone (sumptuous kimonos and breezy yakutas designed by Kumiko Ogawa) merit their own essay, each garment impeccably reflecting a person’s status and the season.

Within this world, the cast gives exquisite, masterful performances. Western audiences may recognize Ken Watanabe as a characteristically subtle and layered Hanai Hanjiro, the don of the Hanai Kabuki family who gradually reveals himself as one of the film’s most selfish characters. Ryo Yoshizawa, who stars as Kikuo, and Ryusei Yokohama, who plays the Hanai heir Shunsuke, trained in Kabuki for a year and a half—long enough, they’ve noted, to understand how inadequate that span is for an art form most practitioners begin in childhood. That tension and reverence is visible on screen; theirs are performances that understand the gravity of the art form.

If the film falters, it is in overlooking its female cast. The film is nearly three hours long, and I occasionally found myself frustrated with what felt like an overserving of attention to its male protagonists’ emotional journeys, sidelining women whose lives are profoundly shaped by these traditions. I wished that the script had taken a few notes from its source text, giving roundness and depth to the women who adorn and propel the lives of Kikuo, Shunsuke, and Hanjiro. Hanai’s wife Sachiko, played by the formidable Shinobu Terajima—herself descended from a household of renowned Kabuki actors—was criminally underutilized.

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Spanning from the 1960s to the 2010s, the film bears witness to an epic scope of time and the many ways Japan has evolved and calcified over half a century. We begin in the aftermath of World War II, when the country was raw, recovering, about to embark on a journey of meteoric economic growth. By the end, we’ve surpassed the bubbly economic promises of the 1980s and the ensuing stagnation of the “lost decade,” giving way to a sense of national jadedness in the 2000s.

So, what does Kokuho have to say about all that Japan has been, is now, or will be? Without giving too much away, the film ends with a meditation on its title, which refers to what are known as “living national treasures,” a designation given by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology to certain elite practitioners who preserve traditional Japanese performing arts or crafts.

In lesser hands, this designation would function as a tidy endpoint: As a living national treasure, the outsider becomes an undeniable insider, tradition triumphs over change, and assimilation is prized above all else.

Lee, thankfully, resists that temptation. At the film’s culmination, both Shunsuke and Kikuo have achieved recognition, but at immense personal cost—relationships severed, affection sacrificed. Kokuho asks if becoming a national treasure is worth losing one’s self in the process, whether safeguarding culture is worth giving up what makes us human: a generosity of spirit, our connection to each other, whatever it is in a person’s soul that thrums with recognition when encountering a great work of art.

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The film ends, the curtains drop. The audience steps out, blinking, into the sunlight, and is left to wonder about the real world around them, about the Japan they see today. As its leaders engage in saber rattling against China, is war on the horizon? As it continues to drift rightward, cutting off paths for residency for immigrants who are vital to the country’s workforce, who gets to call the country home? And as peer nations legalize gay marriage, will Japan ever recognize same-sex couples, or will it be forever doomed to rehashing quaint questions of whether married women can have different last names than their husbands?

Perhaps addressing these questions feels like too much. Perhaps these questions are too big.

So Lee Sang-il gives the audience Kokuho to carry in their pockets, as if to say: “Start here. Think about this jewel box I’ve made for you, this world of drama and art. Consider on this stage what it means to belong, what it means to be a treasure of the state, and what we might lose if we cling too tightly to what once was.”