“There ain’t nothing like the loving of a hard-driving cowboy man,” as the country singer Barbara Jean puts it towards the end of Robert Altman’s movie Nashville, and, really, there ain’t nothing like Nashville itself, either. It’s surprising more has not been made of it this year, when the country’s 250th anniversary has got tangled up with the flailing Trump presidency.

Though he made the film in 1975, Altman set it a year in the future, amid a fictionalized and chaotic 1976 presidential campaign. He meant to give an account of a country that, on the 200th anniversary of its founding, had descended into unprecedented gaudiness and depravity. When Jimmy Carter wound up winning the White House, Nashville came to seem prophetic. But it is more than that. It is probably the greatest of American movies.

The plot is simple. A plain-spoken, establishment-baiting insurgent candidate named Hal Phillip Walker has entranced the country, to the horror of the political establishment. “New roots for the nation” is the motto of his Replacement party. Walker wants to tax churches, abolish the electoral college, change the national anthem and get lawyers out of politics. A slick advance man comes to the country-music capital to convince as many stars as he can to perform at a rally for Walker the following weekend. Funny things happen, as well as a certain number of humiliating, disturbing and violent ones.

To watch the movie’s characters at work is to recognize a kinship between celebrity and politics

To watch the movie’s........

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