Bird is the word

Birdman begins with a shot from behind a naked man alone in a room. He seems to be doing some yoga-like meditation while sitting cross-legged and motionless, plus he’s levitating a foot or so above the floor. A moment or two later, as the call comes for him to return to an ongoing rehearsal onstage, we realize he is an actor in a grungy theater dressing room.

Once he’s ready to go, the camera follows him, in a documentary-style long take, through the full, semi-circuitous trek from dressing room to rehearsal stage. The actor (a balding guy named Riggan, played by Michael Keaton) is both directing and starring in his adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story. There are three other actors involved—two women and a rather hapless-looking guy. The latter is soon removed from the play by an accident involving a falling stage light. Riggan, however, asserts offhandedly that it was no accident.

Most of what transpires in those early moments is portrayed in terms of a rough-edged realism, and the first mysterious details—the levitation, the deus ex machina of the falling light, the hints of telekinetic powers in Riggan—pass without comment or explanation. But mixtures of realistic grit and occasional tremors of the supernatural are integral to the whole of Birdman, which soon takes spectacular flight in several forms—a bizarre and somewhat convulsive backstage comedy, a high-spirited psychodrama couched in terms of comic-book imagery, a fantasy within a fantasy that is both deadly serious and exuberantly playful.

The backstage stuff accelerates with the arrival of Mike (Edward Norton), the swaggering actor hastily brought on board to replace the “accident” victim. Mike is married to Lesley (Naomi Watts), who is also in the play, but both are clearly free and independent souls. Laura (Andrea Riseborough), the other woman in the play, is Riggan’s current companion, and both seem to view their relationship as a series of opportunities for mutually beneficial role-playing. The practical side of all this is reflected by Riggan’s manager/ producer/sidekick Jake (a charmingly straight-faced Zach Galifianakis).

Riggan’s psychodrama emerges via his tangled involvements with all of those characters and also with his ex-wife Sylvia (Amy Ryan) and their daughter Sam (an excellent Emma Stone). But the first signs of psychodrama are also present in the early moments: Riggan’s chief claim to fame is having played the movie superhero Birdman, and in the waning days of his acting career he is quite thoroughly haunted by that role and its nagging intrusions on his rather uncertain sense of himself.

The voice of “Birdman” is in Riggan’s head early on and we can hear it too. Eventually, he’s also present as a kind of ogre in a superhero costume. By then it seems fairly evident that he’s maybe the most tenacious and troubling of the several alter egos swirling around Riggan in this movie, and that Norton’s wildly “experimental” Mike is at the very least a close second. A perversely ironic drama critic, one Tabitha Dickenson (smartly played by Lindsay Duncan), rates high in this respect as well.

All of these elements are seemingly in play as the film reaches its mysterious and multifaceted climax. We’re left to make what sense of it we can, or will.

But before you get to that, Birdman is an immensely entertaining film. The script (credited to director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-writers Nicolás Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr. and Armando Bo) shows exceptional wit, and Iñárritu’s direction and Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography are brilliantly elaborate throughout. Plus, there are at least eight outstanding performances here, with Norton and Stone being especially fine.