One of the most devilish aspects of climate change is that it resists good art. But Adam McKay, director first of comedies like Anchorman and later of more serious fare like The Big Short, has cracked the code. Don’t Look Up (in theaters today; coming to Netflix on Dec. 24) is the first climate movie — the first work of art about climate change of any kind — to hold my rapt attention from start to finish. It is fantastic.One reason it’s so good is that it isn’t really about climate change at all. It’s about a pair of scientists, played by Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, who discover that a large comet is heading directly toward Earth and will strike, and wipe out all life on the planet, in just over six months. They try to tell people. It does not go well. Don’t Look Up attempts to capture, not so much climate change itself, but one of the most vertiginously weird aspects of understanding climate change: you know this terrible thing is coming and yet … no one’s acting like it. You end up feeling like the ranting guy on the street corner waving a sign about how the end is nigh. The movie is about having knowledge but being unable to make the knowledge matter, being unable to make anyone hear or act on it. By compressing the timeline to six months and making the threat a singular force, visible in the sky, it brings the absurdity of the situation to the surface. It’s hilarious, and if you’ve spent years banging your head against a wall trying to get people to pay attention to climate change, you will find a great deal of catharsis in the laughter. Before we get to the movie, a word on climate and art.Climate change makes for bad artBy its very nature, climate change is abstract, the sum of millions of observations and long chains of reasoning. It unfolds slowly, over the course of decades and centuries. Its effects are felt incrementally, across the globe, in disparate ways. In short, climate change isn’t a good villain. It has no plans or intentions. It’s not even a singular force, it is simply the descriptor we apply to the panoply of changes happening around us. The magic trick of good art is that it uses specificity — particular people, places, and relationships — to evoke universal human feelings. We have been designed by evolution to feel most intensely about things that are close to us, within spatial and temporal boundaries that are legible to us. We’re not designed to feel anything about a projected 50-year change in global average temperature.We can know and understand that forecast in an intellectual way, but to really feel it, to integrate it into one’s basic narratives and worldview, requires conscious cultivation. It does not come naturally; it is not universal.That makes climate change a lousy subject for art. Over the years that I have been writing about it I have been exposed to many, many songs, poems, documentaries, short stories, and novels about it. They are all like vegan food: the intentions are commendable, the spirit is good, it even looks on the outside like normal food, but the taste … let’s just say, it feels like I’m supposed to be eating it, and if I weren’t supposed to, I’d be eating something else that tastes better.(Vegans: I love you. Please do not write me angry emails.) So too with climate art. It runs into one or more of four main dangers. One, it can be treacly. This is most climate documentaries: swelling orchestral music beneath shot after shot of Natural Beauty Under Threat. Two, in order to compress climate change into something dramatic on a human time scale, it can mangle the science, as in 2004’s The Day After Tomorrow, wherein a key scene finds our heroes fleeing from an oncoming wall of, uh, freezing. It’s not that I’m a stickler for strict scientific accuracy in art, but once you make climate change into a disaster fit for a disaster movie, you’ve changed all the structural features that make the climate crisis what it is. You’re not illuminating anything about the reality.Thr