Stage Play on the Screen

Rating: 9/10 (28 October 2018)

I'll start by saying this movie is worth seeing at least once, at least to see what it is doing. It is shot much like Hitchcock's *Rope*, though not exactly. It isn't all one shot, but there are many shots that flow from scene to scene. The catch? Those scenes are not always chronologically continuous. This is a fact you very well might miss if you are distracted or have something inhibiting you (the theatre I watched it in first however many years ago had abysmal audio, so this was me the first time).
This may sound disorienting, but if you change the way you are viewing the movie, I think it will help. Don't look at it as a standard movie: instead, view it as a stage play whose stage is an entire neighborhood, mostly one building, and which was mostly captured as it was being performed by a cameraman. This means that the actors moving in and out of scene have the same flow that a stage play has, and this also explains the presence of the drummer that you randomly see in the background performing the soundtrack to the movie. (Yes, the soundtrack is mostly a drummer; it works really well somehow.)
There's only one tiny wrench in this, the movie has all sorts of elements that are generally assumed to be hallucinations or imaginings of the main character (Keaton). In different scenes where he is alone, we see him using various telekinetic powers. Occasionally, we actually see his younger self as Birdman (an action-movie role from his younger days) in person, although usually he just antagonizes him via voice over. Some of the few hard cuts in the movie that do not follow an actor from one room to another are used to establish that the telekinesis in the previous scene is probably just Keaton throwing stuff around the room in anger.
How to reconcile this is... well, difficult. It certainly plays with the tension between stage plays and movies. In neither is everything you see always taken literally, but in stage plays it is much more figurative (hence the bending of time and space from scene to scene). But on stage, you usually can't perform the kinds of special effects (characteristic of movies) that we are being asked not to take literally. (I'm trying to stay spoiler free, so I'll not say what I'm thinking right now.)
This is where we should look at the themes of the movie, because these formal elements in conflict that I mentioned mirror the thematic conflict between cinema and theatre. Long story short, the premise of the mov... (movie? . . . stageplay? . . . ) ...of the story is that Keaton is a has-been actor, known (very well known) for superhero movies he did ten or twenty years ago, all based around a character named Bat*coughs* I mean, Birdman.
Sound familiar? Okay, good. Well the inciting incident in the story is that he is trying to reclaim his career as an actor in general, and with it his artistic street-cred, so to speak, by writing (adapting), directing, and starring in a play. It is based on a novel by someone who encouraged him to be an actor when he was a child. Therefore, this isn't a move of cold calculation, trying to get famous again after years of not being as successful as he was as Birdman and therefore being artistically inauthentic, although he is certainly accused of this. But it is instead a very real attempt to reconnect with his younger, artistic self, before Birdman, which he sees as the inauthentic detour of his career and as not what he wants to be remembered for.
The conflict is, he seems to be finding that the film world doesn't translate to the stage world. He seems to be hitting the problem that there may not be such a thing as an "actor-in-general" but only two separate things called "stage-actor" and "screen-actor." On multiple occasions, this film criticizes the spectacles that saturate Hollywood and the celebrity culture it grows in the Petri dish of its award shows. Edward Norton plays his foil, someone else who finds himself on stage more than he does in his natural life, yet a stage insider, rather than a film one.
The film isn't all anti film culture, however. In many ways, film has its last laugh when we see that the kinds of things that make the theatre-world fall in love with you and fawn over your talent are superficial as well.
The formal conflict inherent in how the film is delivered therefore mirrors the thematic content that is being delivered, which is almost always the optimum result.
In other words, I have a lot of respect for this movie. I rate it 9 stars because that is how I say I think everyone should give it a fair chance.