A two-hours-plus saga of family fortunes set across several decades and two countries — but mainly in present-day Argentina — Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro is huge in its ambition, frequently operatic in its style and, on balance, impressive in its achievement.

Young Benjamin (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, excellent) turns up in Buenos Aires in search of his much older brother, Angelo (Vincent Gallo, as brooding as ever but kept on a firm leash by Coppola).

Angelo fled the family home under mysterious circumstances many years ago and has renamed himself Tetro. He now lives with Miranda (Maribel Verdú, in the film’s standout performance) and wants nothing to with his family. Why this is takes Coppola the rest of the film to explain.

The father (Klaus Maria Brandauer, seen in flashback) is a famous musician, as is his brother. This is Coppola’s background, too, and some of the scenes have more than a hint of autobiography. But, said the director afterwards, while “nothing in the film actually happened, everything is true”.

Coppola’s films have always been made up of passages of brilliance interspersed with moments of surprising clumsiness and Tetro is no exception.

But while in masterworks such as Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now, the brilliance carried all before it, here the two are more evenly matched. The concluding section, set during a risible arts festival in Patagonia, nudges the absurd.

Coppola’s storyline is also problematic. While the family conflicts are firmly in the tradition of Eugene O’Neill and Arthur Miller, the film, structured around a series of car accidents, moves forward according to Coppola’s masterplan rather than any intrinsic logic.

But the key scenes between Ehrenreich, Gallo and Verdú, shot in ravishing digital black-and-white by Mihail Malaimare. For all its faults, Tetro shows what Youth Without Youth cast into doubt: that Coppola is still a great film-maker, even if he cannot always sustain the greatness.