'Birdman' is one of the century's best, really

At the beginning of

Birdman (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

, Michael Keaton's brooding, jittery Riggan Thomson, a Hollywood star faded from view, is in the lotus position, in his underpants, meditating. In his own mind at least, he is doing transcendent stuff.

But maybe it's not just in his mind.

Like its cross-legged protagonist - famous way-back-when as the titular superhero of a blockbuster franchise and now trying to reclaim his career, his legitimacy, and his soul by staging his adaptation of a Raymond Carver story on Broadway - Birdman operates on a whole other plane of existence. It is an out-of-the-blue masterwork that ranks as one of the best films of not just the year, but the decade, the century.

Sure, that sounds like hyperbole. But Alejandro G. Iñárritu's fierce, funny, breathless dive into the head of a man in deep trouble will set audiences talking, debating, wobbling with awe.

Birdman is backstage melodrama, a farce in a death mask. It's also a razor-sharp study of warring egos, people in need (of affirmation, of love), and the magic trick of the theater (and movie) experience: men and women rising above themselves to become someone else, something other, and move a crowd in the process.

Keaton, who did his time in cape and cowl for Tim Burton's Batman and Batman Returns, gives a performance drawn from personal and professional experience, but also from the dark, scary recesses of his psyche.

An all-powerful theater critic (Lindsay Duncan) dismisses Riggan as "a Hollywood clown in a Lycra birdsuit." She is manifestly hostile to his grand endeavor to mount his version of Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" on the proscenium of the St. James Theater. But Riggan has mortgaged his Malibu house, poured his savings into the show.

Joining Riggan onstage in the two-couple drama are the noble thespians played by Andrea Riseborough and Naomi Watts, with Edward Norton in the role of Mike Shiner, a man of the theater whose determination to find the "truth" in a character, a play, has made him both revered and reviled. With its improvisatory score, its seamless shots, its leaps into the surreal, and then back again into the excruciating, embarrassing real, Birdman ascends to the greatest of heights.

It's a heady view up there, wherever "there" is.

Birdman

****

(Out of four stars)

Opens in area theaters Friday.EndText