Everyone is talking about “The Batman” right now. Even people who don’t know what they are talking about. (Like me.)

I’m not well-schooled in the DC universe. But I know a zeitgeist movie when I see one, and “The Batman” really is the perfect movie for this imperfect moment in America.

It comes amid two years of pent-up pandemic anxiety. Nearly 1 million COVID corpses. Hypocritical and feckless politicians. Indiscriminate violence in our streets. An epic mental-health care crisis and a corresponding opioid epidemic. Bizarre weather catastrophes. Martial law. Brainwashed yahoos storming the Capitol building. A teenaged domestic terrorist made into a celebrity gun-rights hero. Faith in once-cherished institutions, from governments to churches to the media, up in smoke. Misinformation proliferating throughout the dark web like fungi. And just last week, Colorado’s congressional shame, Lauren Boebert, gets the media attention she so cravenly desires by heckling the president while he is invoking his dead son.

At a time when we seem to be teetering on a collective razor’s edge between order and chaos, along comes a comic-book movie that leaps with full fury into utter chaos. “The Batman” depicts a dystopian world of unchecked corruption, overt greed, unrepentant crime, drug abuse, vengeance and, perhaps most telling of all, a complete lack of hope.

After living for three hours in Director Matt Reeves’ cinematic urban cesspool that can only be cleansed with an intervention of Biblical proportions, it’s hard to tell the two worlds apart. You walk out of the make-believe septic tank back into our own and wonder, “Is this all that different?”

Depending on your perspective, the two most principled characters in this messed-up world turn out to be the misunderstood hero and the misguided villain who are tangled in a twisted kind of courtship. Our tormented hero seems just as likely to turn out to be a sociopath as the actual serial killer. The line is just that blurred.

The Riddler here is a sadistic killer (inspired in part by the Zodiac) who has taken it upon himself to do what the city’s own corrupt law enforcement won’t: Drain the swamp. At first, he targets powerful victims who clearly have it coming. But as often happens, this type of internet-fueled mob justice builds to a horrible climax that frankly, doesn’t seem all that implausible after the Jan. 6 attack on Washington.

The Batman and The Riddler both operate outside of any official crime-fighting capacity. This is not good vs. evil. It’s vigilante vs. vigilante. And it’s easy to see Paul Dano’s take on The Riddler emboldening anyone who has felt righteously disempowered to take up a gas mask and an AK-47.

This film is a conspiracy theorist’s dream. One that confirms our cynicism about the integrity of public servants and affirms our lack of faith in institutions. It even ridicules our belief in the crime-fighting crusader himself. Because, as is often repeated throughout the film, The Batman is losing this fight – and he knows it. He is never going to restore justice and order to Gotham City – if either ever actually existed there. It’s a big city. He can’t be everywhere. “I’m only one man,” he tells us.

That grim reality takes whatever comfort we might glean from his determination to soldier on in his crimefighting seem all the more pointless. He’s a tormented millionaire self-condemned to a fool’s mission. It’s like watching a Beckett play. “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Nothing to be done.

“The Batman” is unlike any other film of its superhero genre. And a superb (if overly long) piece of filmmaking that feels more like an indie horror flick than a comic-book fantasy. A “Taxi Driver” for our times. The pulse it sets is seat-shaking, backed by a score fueled not by hard-driving rock but sinister tiny taps on a piano. It features stars at every turn, and a breakout performance by Zoë Kravitz as a vengeful grifter named Selina Kyle. (But you can call her Catwoman.)

In the end, it struck me just how “The Batman” makes for the perfect companion film to “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s bitingly funny parable of our distracted times that uses satire to call attention to the existential climate crisis that is now barreling toward Earth in the form of a meteor. Unlike “The Batman,” it’s a broad comedy. But both films serve as cinematic primal screams that are trying to wake up their audiences.

“The Batman” is not a fun movie. And yet, when it was over, a packed theater stood and cheered. Maybe because they really are fans of the source comic book. Maybe because finally, here comes a “Batman” film that pretty much gets it right. And maybe, for some, because they actually experienced a little bit of actual catharsis over the way things have been going in our real world.

Which is genuinely terrifying.