Theater People!

BIRDMAN (A) - This is what the wonder of cinema and storytelling is all about. The always ambitious Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is back on his game with the epic tragedy of a former Hollywood super-hero star desperately grasping for relevance and critical acclaim by staging a Raymond Carver play on Broadway.

Michael Keaton plays Riggan , who used to play the wildly popular Birdman a couple of decades ago before he turned down Birdman IV and his career went south. You might recall that Keaton, ages ago, played Batman a couple of times on the big screen after his "Beetlejuice" breakthrough. Keaton intimately knows what obsolescence feels like.

When we first see Riggan, he is in his dressing room, seated in the lotas position in his underwear (the briefs are a running theme), hovering two feet off the floor -- Inarritu is not shy about announcing the playfulness and grim magical realism that will permeate the story. Riggan can seemingly move objects through telekinesis. And he is also haunted by a voice that serves as his conscience; it's the voice of his Birdman character, presumably Keaton doing his breathy, gravelly imitation of Christian Bale's recent Batman. Are we ensconced in the meta-narrative yet?

Riggan is disappointed in his male co-star in the play, which is poised to start previews. When the co-star is conveniently rendered unable to perform, he is replaced by arrogant hot-shot Mike (Edward Norton), the boyfriend of another star in the show Lesley (Naomi Watts, solid). ("How do you know him?" someone asks Lesley. She replies, "We share a vagina.") Riggan is sleeping with the other cast member, Laura (a wonderfully expressive Andrea Riseborough). He's got his daughter helping out on the crew, Sam, a recovering junkie (a live-wire Emma Stone). And he's trying to maintain peace with her mother, his ex Sylvia (the perfect Amy Ryan). Trying to hold the production together is Riggan's attorney pal Jake (Zach Galifianakis, tightly controlled), a jumble of nerves.

Even if the story weren't compelling, "Birdman" would be worth seeing just for the visual wonder created by Inarritu, the lightning-rod director of "Amores Perros" and "Babel" and the misfires "21 Grams" and "Biutiful." Here, he is a master wielding the camera along with the eminent cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (coming off of Terence Malick's last two films and Alfonso Cuaron's "Children of Men" and "Gravity"). "Birdman" is shot and edited as if it were one long take. Characters pass through doors and into the next scene, jumping seamlessly in time. The viewer gets sucked in and carried along by the current.

All the while, Inarritu injects a nervous, fumbling jazz drum score. It jangles the entire movie. It serves as both warning and rim shot. It makes it seem as if Riggan is tumbling down a flight of stairs half the time. It is the soundtrack of his apparent nervous breakdown. He's not the only one suffering here; every main character reveals a fatal flaw or paralyzing insecurity. Stone, Norton and Galifianakis feed off of each other's energies.

The dialogue is sharp, the plot tight and propulsive. A plotline involving a bitter, vindictive New York Times theater critic ratchets the tension. Inarritu (also writing, with three others) has created a profound mix of "All That Jazz" and "A Prairie Home Companion." It's a thrill ride that both celebrates and scathingly satirizes the entertainment industry. 

In that opening scene we see this saying tacked on Riggan's vanity mirror: "A thing is a thing. Not what is said about that thing." For two hours, this film thoroughly cloaks itself in the creative ideal; it internalizes the process of transforming some "thing" as well as the criticism of the end product.

The play's the thing. "Birdman" captures that perfectly.