That's the improbable name of an actor played by Keaton, whose fretful, energetic performance is one of the film's many impressive component parts that, frustratingly, never cohere into a whole.
The world knows him as the aerial superhero Birdman, and when we meet him he's levitating (it's a recurring motif, like a humourless running gag, that Thomson has retained some of Birdman's superpowers, including telekinesis) and seething with rage at the continuing success of other screen titans.
He's in his dressing room in the last days of rehearsal for a play based on a famous short story by Raymond Carver, and things aren't going well.
An actor is brained in what may or may not be an accident, and his emergency replacement, Mike Shiner (Norton), brings a lot of baggage, not least that he's the boyfriend of leading lady Lesley (Watts).
The two-hour film, shot in and around an off-Broadway theatre and a nearby bar, is notionally a single take (spotting the cuts is half the fun), which allows Inarritu to move seamlessly between present and past and between Thomson's real life and the one conjured only by his resentment and neurotic imagination.
Michael Keaton in Birdman. Photo / AP
That is the least of the visual flights of fancy (there are meteors, monsters and more green-screening than you can shake a stick at) that Inarritu deploys, taking us deeper in to Thomson's despair.
But it just never adds up. The play, what little we see of it, is a crock, anyway; we're meant to care about it, but it deserves to fail. Inarritu sets up a terrific bar-room exchange between Thomson and the Times critic (Duncan) but it's based on a fallacy: no critic, no matter how cruel, openly vows to destroy a play before she's seen it simply because she hates the star. And no critic worth the name would change her mind as suddenly as this one does.
Emma Stone in a scene from Birdman.
The film is, in the end, like a roller-coaster ride: it's dizzying and thrilling but you don't go anywhere. It's a series of such glittering but hollow exchanges between characters who always look and act like characters.
When its subtitle - The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance - shows up late in the film, we still have no idea why, or what it means. It just sounds good. Well, this film looks good, but it's hard to disagree with the (perhaps imaginary) sidewalk apparition during the endless climax who intones Macbeth as Thomson walks past: there's a lot of sound and fury here, all right, and what it signifies is sound and fury.
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