A concept long buzzed about among comic book fans — the multiverse — is now coming to the art house. 

The sci-fi high concept, featuring characters capable of bouncing between parallel universes, is used to fashion a parable on a Chinese American family’s intergenerational culture clashes in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

The saying that not all heroes wear capes fits perfectly with Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh). Evelyn runs an unassuming laundromat where she’s battling on multiple fronts — and that’s just in the everyday universe. Her foes include the Internal Revenue Service, which is auditing her taxes; her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), who is contemplating a divorce; and her lesbian daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), who is drifting away because of what she perceives to be a lack of acceptance. 

While meeting with IRS agent Deirdre (Jamie Lee Curtis), an alternate-universe Waymond abruptly comes calling, “Matrix”-style, to recruit Evelyn into the multiverse, where her various fights become physical: she must fend off attacks coming from all directions — including from alternate-universe Deirdre — on her path to the ultimate showdown, with evil overlord Jobu Tupaki (also Ms. Hsu). 

Per the internal logic of the film, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as the Daniels), every decision a person makes prompts the universe to splinter. The resulting parallel universes represent the paths not chosen: depending on how you look at it, life’s endless possibilities or missed opportunities. 

So there are thousands of Evelyns, and each embarks on her own path: as an actress, a martial artist, a teppanyaki chef, a pizzeria mascot, a Peking opera singer, a maid, etc. Eventually, the main character figures out how to summon and download the skill sets of other Evelyns after mastering what’s known as ’verse jumping. As Benjamin Franklin said, she can do anything she sets her mind to. 

This is the role of a lifetime for Ms. Yeoh, a Hong Kong cinema icon who made a name for herself as an action star who performs her own stunts. She rises to the occasion in this showcase of her range — emotional, physical, and linguistic. 

In addition to embodying several incarnations of the same character and springily performing choreographed fight sequences with the precision of an acrobat, Ms. Yeoh seamlessly delivers dialogue in English, Mandarin, and Cantonese, sometimes switching mid-sentence.  

What the Daniels have given us here is far beyond a loving tribute à la Quentin Tarantino. Although American, they’ve taken Hong Kong cinema to what would have been its logical next level had the once-influential industry not succumbed to a talent drain during the 1990s. 

The film has everything we love about chopsocky, the Stephen Chow-brand of mo lei tau comedy, and Wong Kar-wai’s doomed romances. The fight sequences are impeccably staged and captured with fluid and agile camerawork. Although the film is messy at times, and some of its plethora of ideas are half-baked, its go-for-broke bravado is to be admired. 

It’s possible there are deeper meanings behind the film’s frequent change of aspect; what we, the moviegoers, are watching may have been a movie-within-a-movie starring the actress version of Evelyn, for example. Perhaps multiple viewings are in order to fully discern how these dots connect.  

As chaotic and bonkers as the film appears, at its core there is a big heart. Like “Turning Red” and “Umma,” “Everything Everywhere” attempts to tackle cultural and generational trauma with Asian-American specificity. 

Although some of its metaphors are a bit of a stretch and borderline nonsensical, in the end the film does resolve the family conflicts and heals the fissures poignantly. Evelyn’s helicopter parenting stems from her love for Joy, and she will fight her tooth and nail, quite literally, to prove it.