On Movies: Michael Shannon, grappling with the mind

There are many good reasons to take in

Take Shelter,

one of the strongest films to emerge from the recent Toronto International Film Festival. For one, it stars

Michael Shannon

, nominated for a best-supporting-actor Oscar for his role as a brutally perceptive mental patient in 2008's

Revolutionary Road

.

And for another, Take Shelter - opening Friday at the Ritz Five and Rave Motion Pictures at the Ritz Center/NJ - gets to the heart of one of the nagging questions of human existence.

"The question is: How close can people really get to one another?" says Shannon, on the phone from Vancouver the other day. "Can we share each other's burdens? Can we really share each other's identities in full - without secrets, without withholding anything? How much can people really be together?

"That's one of the fundamental issues for me as a person . . . because it seems like nobody wants to be alone, and yet everybody has something to hide."

In Take Shelter, written and directed by Jeff Nichols, Shannon plays an Ohio construction worker, a seemingly rock-solid citizen with a beautiful wife (The Tree of Life's Jessica Chastain), with a beautiful daughter, with close friends and coworkers. And then, for no apparent reason, he starts to have nightmares and starts to believe that something catastrophic is about to occur. The fact that he has a mother who was diagnosed with schizophrenia - who went off the rails many years ago - looms large as his world begins to fall apart.

"We all have different feelings about what's happening out there," Shannon explains. "Some people are worried, some people aren't. And people ask me, they say, 'Is this a movie about what's happening in the world?'

"And I say, well, I guess it depends on who you are. Some people think it is, and some people think that my character, Curtis, is simply crazy . . . .

"One of the great things about Jeff's story is that it's not set in a big city. It's in a very small, ostensibly very peaceful community, and . . . people may be struggling financially, trying to make ends meet, but it doesn't seem like anybody around Curtis has the slightest idea of what he's talking about, or what he's so afraid of.

"But if you had set this story in the big city - New York City, or someplace like that - well, they literally have signs on the bus stops saying Be Prepared for a Disaster."

Shannon, who plays the Prohibition-era federal agent Nelson Van Alden in Martin Scorsese's Boardwalk Empire, lives in New York, so he's seen those bus shelter and subway signs. But nowadays, thanks to all the work he's been getting, he hasn't been home much.

He's been shooting Man of Steel, Zack Snyder's Superman reboot, in Vancouver and Illinois - Shannon is General Zod, the Kryptonian super-villain. He has a smaller role in his friend Nichols' new film, Mud, which stars Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon and has just started production in Arkansas. And he recently shot The Iceman, playing the real-life contract killer Richard Kuklinski. James Franco, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Benicio del Toro are in that one.

Just under the surface in many of Shannon's roles, there's a sense of menace, a man who could readily become unhinged. That 2009 Oscar nomination - a dream for a working actor - nonetheless may have pigeonholed Shannon a bit. If you're looking for someone unstable and rageful, maybe Shannon is your man.

But in Take Shelter, Shannon sees his character as "essentially a very normal person."

"I mean, up until the time the movie starts, he's an everyday kind of Everyman."

Early on, Shannon says, Nichols expressed concern that because of the actor's previous work, maybe people would "see me and right away assume that there was something wrong with Curtis.

"And that's fair. I don't mind that."

And then Nichols heard Shannon talking to his daughter.

"Jeff and I were on the phone one day, and my daughter, Sylvia, ran up and started talking to me, and I started talking to her. And Jeff overheard us and said he heard a whole other side of me that he didn't realize was there.

"And, in a way, that was my audition for Curtis - Jeff hearing me talk to my daughter. He saw that I was a father, that I came across as this sensitive person."

Nichols' film, too, reflects current anxieties about the economy - unemployment, foreclosures, the fallout of the Great Recession. Without banging you over the head, Take Shelter describes what life for the shrinking middle class is like these days.

"He's really tuned in to that part of the world," Shannon says about his director. "The Midwestern, Southwestern corridor from Ohio down to Texas there. It's his wheelhouse.

"And I appreciate the fact that he puts in all the details . . . like somebody pumping gas and looking at the dollars racking up there, or somebody counting the change in the box that they keep their money in for the vacation.

"A lot of people think, 'Oh you can't put stuff like that in movies, nobody's going to think that's interesting. But it's actually very interesting, and it's very relevant.

"You know, a lot of times you go to a movie for escape, or to relax, or just to have fun, but every once in a while it's nice to see a movie that feels like it might be from the same world as you."

Good Shepard. In Blackthorn, a beautiful western shot in the exotic high country of Bolivia, Sam Shepard plays an old outlaw in hiding. A famous old outlaw, long believed dead. James Blackthorn, he calls himself, though his real name is Butch Cassidy.

Yes, as in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Was Shepard, the playwright/musician/director/fiction writer/actor, at all wary of taking on a character immortalized in one of the biggest box-office hits of the late '60s?

"No, I thought it was always a good idea, because of the script," he says. "It was so great. Plus the fact that they were going to shoot in Bolivia interested me. The original Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid never influenced me, or got in the way of this thing, because I thought it was entirely its own animal. I wasn't bothered at all by following in the footsteps of anything.

"The funny thing is, somebody asked me who I was playing in the movie, and I told them: Butch Cassidy. And they said you don't look anything at all like Paul Newman."

Shepard, on the phone from New York, laughs.

"Yeah, then I understood that the character is totally separate from the actor."

Among his castmates in Blackthorn is Stephen Rea, the Irish actor, playing a grizzled Pinkerton agent who's long been on Blackthorn's trail. Shepard and Rea have known each other since the '70s.

"Stephen is one of my oldest friends," Shepard says. "We did a lot of theater together. We've done two plays at the Abbey Theatre that I wrote and directed him in. But this is the first time I've ever acted with him - and his character goes through this crazy transformation."

Shepard, of course, is also good friends with Patti Smith, the poet-turned-rocker (and prize-winning memoirist). They, too, have known each other since the 1970s, and Shepard is playing on two songs on the album Smith's currently recording.

Asked whether he's ever conscious - or self-conscious - about all the different fields he's plowing, Shepard says no, not really.

"Mostly, it feels seamless," he explains, "because I've always connected it to theater. Now and then it feels weird, because there are so many different parts to what I'm doing. But typically, they all feel like parts of the same creature.

"You have to honor the form that you're addressing, but hopefully you don't see the stitches."