Birdman: Backstage at Broadway

Birdman is a technical masterpiece. Shot so that the entire movie looks like it was filmed in one take (a la Hitchcock's Rope, albeit much more sophisticated), the movie is a mesmerizing, claustrophobic look behind the scenes of a Broadway play and a winking ode to Hollywood, stardom, and the dangers of staging a comeback.

Michael Keaton stars as Riggan Thomson, an actor who famously played the superhero Birdman decades ago (a hilarious nod to Keaton's real-life tenure as Batman), but has been on a bit of a career downslide ever since. He has now decided to establish himself as a serious actor by writing, directing, and starring in a play adapted from a Raymond Carver short story. The movie starts the day before previews are due to begin, when an actor is injured by a falling light and Riggan has to deal with the first of many snafus that will cause the play to devolve into a raucous shambles. 

The movie's tone is black and hysterical. The cast is pitch perfect, with Emma Stone playing Sam, Riggan's fresh-out-of-rehab daughter who is obsessed with social media and fed up with her father; Naomi Watts and Edward Norton playing a couple of married actors with wildly differing levels of Broadway experience and narcissism; Zach Galifianakis as Riggan's best friend and producer, who will do or say anything to get the show on the road; and Andrea Riseborough and Amy Ryan as Riggan's current girlfriend and ex-wife, an interesting duo who only serve to complicate matters further. 

I've neglected to mention another key character - Birdman himself. Throughout the movie, Riggan has hallucinatory (or maybe not?) conversations with Birdman, who has a very Christian Bale-like sinister voice and is constantly tormenting Riggan with his failures and ineptitude. The sense of dreamy insanity is further propelled by the brilliant percussive score by Antonio Sanchez, a drum-fueled nightmare that relentlessly pounds through every scene and keeps you on the edge of your seat. 

Ultimately, Birdman is a movie I need to see multiple times before I figure out what it's about and how I feel about it. Director (and co-writer) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has created what is clearly a cinematic masterpiece, but it feels so perfect and polished that I felt distanced from it. It contains some sharply-observed humor and reflections on the state of Hollywood, and the performances, particularly by Keaton and Norton, are blustery and brilliant. It's a great movie, but it is also twisted, bizarre, and weird, and it demands to be dissected and analyzed for a good long while.