Much of the dialogue in Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer’s script works at that level of earnest, tough-guy poetry, like a fortune cookie you might find in a vat of Skoal dipping tobacco. Once you’ve got a small hard taste of the bitch at work, there’s only one thing you’ll be able to see - that’s fuel.” “Once you’ve been baptized, you’ll never be able to see it that way again. “I want you all to breathe in this beautiful vista,” Marsh tells his men early on, when they’re still training, as they look at a striking mountain view thick with lush, green trees. “Hotshots” refers not so much to their attitude as to their actual job: It’s a term for those elite fighters who work the front lines of raging wildfires, using axes and chainsaws to cut down trees and chaparral, which they then torch to create “backfires,” in an effort to burn off a large enough stretch of land so that the real wildfire cannot get past that point. (If such incidents appear to be increasing in recent years, that’s because they are.) Only the Brave follows a real-life group of men from an earlier incident: the Granite Mountain Hotshots, a group of young wildfire specialists from the fire department in Prescott, Arizona, whose ordeal in the Yarnell Hill fire of 2013 was harrowingly depicted in a GQ magazine article, on which the film is partly based. It’s also quite timely, given the wildfires currently consuming much of Northern California. Only the Brave is a visually splendid, spellbinding, and surreal movie that also happens to be an emotionally shattering, over-the-top ugly-cry for the ages. The image returns a couple of more times over the course of the picture, a memory that fire crew superintendent Eric Marsh (Josh Brolin) describes as “the most beautiful and terrible thing I’ve ever seen.” Clearly, director Joseph Kosinski has taken that idea to heart. In the opening shot of Only the Brave, a flaming bear - not just a bear that happens to be burning but one that looks as if it had been created entirely from fire - lunges at the camera in the middle of a blazing forest. Holding the line: Josh Brolin leads his men to battle.

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