Birdman: Keaton returns, but don’t call it a comeback

Michael Keaton used to be a box-office superstar, in part because he played Batman in two films. Now he’s starring in much artier fare: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s darkly comic backstage drama Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). Keaton plays Riggan, a guy who used to be a box-office superstar, in part because he played Birdman in three films. (Art improves on life?) Now Riggan is starring in much artier fare: a stage dramatization of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

It’s a passion project, a late-career bid to be taken seriously again, or at least to be noticed. For Keaton or for Riggan? Well, that’s your call, though Keaton certainly comes off better as an actor. Riggan is a man on the edge: everything, absolutely everything, is going wrong in his life. Plus, he’s routinely haunted by his feathery, famous alter-ego: rumbling about past glories and present humiliations, urging him to become the superhero he once was and maybe could be again. It’s tough to portray a man like that without slipping into manic mannerism; Keaton is up to the job.

The action covers the preview performances running up to the show’s premiere, and its devotion to showbiz types and clichés is positively wondrous. For a while, I tried to write them all down, but it got distracting. Besides, they didn’t bother me much, mostly because Innaritu (who also co-wrote) seems so sweetly fond of them. He’s having fun as he winds his camera through the labyrinthine bowels of the theater like a starstruck fly, and he wants you to have fun, too. Just try not to grin when star actress Naomi Watts talks about still being the little girl who always wanted to be an actress, or when troubled daughter Emma Stone lays into Riggan about the folly of his artistic self-importance, or when genius actor Ed Norton says that the only time he can be himself is when he’s onstage. Or, or, or...

Besides, the clichéd action isn’t the point. The point is the artist and the self he is forever attempting to express, the war he is waging on his own brief insignificance, his mighty struggle to slip free of history’s obliterating grip and soar toward heaven and immortality. It’s a hoot. (Mostly, anyway. There are some draggy bits that even the thump-a-drum score cannot enliven.)