Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) review: Keaton in flight again

It is worth noting that the two most successful films in the continuing awards season involve audacious, nearly complementary structural gambles. Whereas Boyhood features discrete episodes compiled over 12 years, Alejandro González Iñárritu's undeniably dazzling Birdman gives the illusion of being filmed in one continuous shot.

The differences could hardly be more marked. Boyhood constantly reminds the viewer that such an experiment could only happen on screen. For all the effects on display in Birdman, the extended, unbroken stretches of dialogue and cinematic business only serve to emphasise the piece's theatricality. We know that (unlike, say, Hitchcock in Rope) Iñárritu can use digital wizardry to splice any number of cuts together. But the impression is still of brave actors speaking their way through three acts of unmediated drama.

This may be deliberate. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) [sic] is very much a film about the theatre. Allowing pounding comparisons to be drawn with his own career, Michael Keaton, once Batman, plays Riggan Thomson, a mildly washed-up actor who, years after achieving fame as the superhero Birdman, is staging a production of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. Complications come in legions. On the eve of the first preview, a light falls on a cast member's head and forces Riggan to recast Mike (Norton), a supremely important theatre actor, in the key role. Laura (Riseborough), Riggan's unexpectedly pregnant girlfriend, and Lesley (Watts), Mike's much-misused other half, are also in the cast. Riggan's sour daughter (Stone) hangs out in the literal wings.

Birdman begins with Riggan suspended magically in the lotus position before a backstage mirror. Throughout the film, when alone, he exhibits superpowers, thus allowing the slim possibility that Birdman is real and inviting the more likely conclusion that stress, booze and disappointment have sent him round the bend.

So dazzling is the cinematic footwork that it proves easy to overlook the uneasy blend between genuine theatrical navel-gazing and satire of the theatrical navel-gazing mindset. There is not a weak performance on display. Keaton allows all dignity to fall away as he makes an insufferable prig of the increasingly fraught central character. Norton sends up his own persona as an actor who believes the oily hype about his supposed brilliance and perfectionism. He is the sort of fellow who insists on drinking real gin on stage and, though romantically inattentive at home, attempts real intercourse before the audience.

Emmanuel Lubezki’s frantic camerawork and jazz drummer Antonio Sánchez’s brilliant score wrestle one another to a brave, endlessly engrossing draw. The texture of the movie alone secures it a place in the pantheon.

Yet, for all this admirably odd film's virtues, its pretensions do let it down at times. Or do they? The choice of the Carver story is perfect for a man who wishes to be perceived as brighter than he actually is. Iñárritu's own script is certainly wary of Riggan's self-absorption. But the importance given to the awful trials of being a thespian do suggest scenes from Nigel Planer's satire I, An Actor. Copies of Jorge Luis Borges's Labyrinths are waved conspicuously. Darling, that subtitle. "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance"? I ask you. Either these are all jokes, in which case the film doesn't amount to very much, or we are touching down too often with adolescent concerns.

Still, it is nice that the film- makers feel such affection for a romantic, largely vanished version of Broadway. Lindsay Duncan chews the optics as a theatre critic who lives in a Martini at one end of a Great White Way tavern. Those days are long gone, Alejandro.