Michael Keaton plays a washed-up actor famous for a series of superhero films trying to salvage his reputation with a self-financed and heartfelt Broadway production, which runs aground at every possible turn. It's obviously easy to see this as Keaton himself and read the Birdman voice in his head taunting him for his failures as Batman, but the freedom the viewer is given to see those parallels really just bolsters the basic theme of the paranoia of a typecast actor very conveniently, and there's no real risk of mistaking his performance as akin to self-parodies such as Van Damme in
JCVD and the like.
The secondary target, after the self-absorption of actors, is critics, and of course critics en masse flocked to praise it to dodge the attack. There is a fair amount to praise, from a technical point of view with its painstakingly crafted long tracking takes, and also in terms of the wit in the dialogue, but the Michel Gondry-style dream sequences and voluntary self-confinement within the walls of the theatre also veer dangerously close to navel-gazing at times.
6/10
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