Michael Keaton takes more chances than Birdman does

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Birdman starts like a 1970s Randy Newman song and ends like a 1990s Randy Newman soundtrack. It’s surly and direct at first, a mean squawk in a minor key, catchy and quotable. But a deceptively simple tune turns into a series of increasingly obvious blares. Unable to settle on whether he and his co-writers are satirizing mainstream tastes or mocking those who say they prefer the underground, director Alejandro González Iñárritu loses the music for the chords.

But before its bafflingly operatic conclusion, Birdman achieves a handful of great things. Every performance is strong, every visual effect extraordinary. Michael Keaton, always a kinetic, verbally dexterous performer, is a live wire again here but also quietly alert and compact as never before. Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and editors Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione have made what looks like one impossible tracking shot, and the lighting and color and movement are thrilling — so much so, they overwhelm fair questions about whether there’s a story here, or a meaning. What comes at you as a fable about artistic risk (there’s a dreadful subtitle: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) has no more narrative oomph than a knock-knock joke — but a knock-knock joke seen from dazzling, impossible angles. Some knock-knock jokes still make you chuckle when you hear them again, so it’s possible that, relieved of months’ worth of hoping that this match-up of the ambitious, technically gifted Iñárritu with reclusive ex-Batman Michael Keaton would be transcendent, I’ll like Birdman better a second time.

To appreciate Birdman the first time, however, requires that you recalibrate your memory a little and your expectations a lot. You have to remember that Keaton turned down the sequel that became the high-grossing disaster Batman Forever, along with the truckload of cash that would have come with it. You must recall that more than one of his co-stars here has done the superhero-movie thing: Edward Norton was a Hulk, Emma Stone a Spider-Man love interest. And you should set aside thoughts of such acute showbiz comedies as Wag the Dog and State and Main. Birdman‘s attempts at backstage farce are its least convincing moments, and the movie overall is about a third as funny as its trailers insist.

Not that realism (or wit, for that matter) is the point. Even the play whose troubled production fires Birdman‘s dramatic action — an earnest-looking adaptation of the Raymond Carver story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” written, directed by and starring costume-wearing superstar turned Trivial Pursuit question Riggan Thomson (Keaton) in a bid to gain artistic legitimacy — turns out to contain at least one ridiculous dream sequence. Various characters debate one another about art in the service of ultimate truth (or vice versa), but what everyone in Iñárritu’s movie has in common is a primal instinct for deception — the director most of all. When the message is that actors and their vehicles are dishonest, Birdman is predictable and obtuse, with no satiric edge and too much attention paid to peripheral characters. (And how is it that, in a movie so dedicated to its protagonist’s interior, we see so much of what everyone else is doing? That breach favors the visuals but fatally punctures Iñárritu’s very intentions.)

But when the script — credited to Iñárritu, Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo — stays with Keaton’s Riggan as he struggles with his own fictions, Birdman is furious and suspenseful.

From the moment we meet Riggan — seen floating, cross-legged, in his ugly cell of a dressing room, his meditation interrupted by the voice of his own crude id — we understand that he can no longer trust his own perceptions. He seems to be able to move objects with his mind, to defy gravity. But he’s subject as well to decidedly terrestrial indignities: a ratty bathrobe he must shed when a door closes on it, a subsequent tighty-whitey hustle through Times Square, a sucker punch from a disgruntled lover. None of it amuses him; all of it, in fact, seems to move him past insanity toward a suicidal impulse. In those voice-overs — if you’ve ever wanted to succeed at something, you’ve heard that cruel voice, the one that says you’re a fraud — Keaton tunes his old Beetlejuice sneer down the scale until it feels barely inside the range of human hearing. It’s a great performance within a very good performance, and though there’s dark comedy in the sheer raunch of each jab, it’s in these screeds that Birdman is both most certain and most dangerous. Birdman wonders whether an artist must obliterate himself in order to be renewed by greater work, but what we hear in Riggan’s head isn’t self-doubt but a truly mortal needling.

This is where the suspense kicks in, a suspense that’s effective but crass. Riggan, we come to understand, may want to die. But this suggestion is paired here with the implication that the act would loose his artistic spirit. There’s an uncomfortable moment, late in Birdman, when I kept thinking of the grotesquely wrongheaded meme that emerged after Robin Williams hanged himself this year, with its variations of “Now you’re free” set to images of the actor’s animated genie character from Aladdin. Suicide doesn’t halt torment, even for an artist; suicide is a forceful transfer of torment. And even the unfortunately flat characters around Riggan don’t deserve that.

Iñárritu seems to know this, but maybe not. His big ending, with its magical realism turned up to 11, is muddled, and nothing that happens resolves his already glib depictions of art battling commerce, New York against Hollywood, acting versus celebrity. He ratifies neither Riggan’s fantasy nor his reality. Birdman knocks, but there’s nobody there when you open the door.