visceral, avante-garde, original - cinema at its best

Rating: 10/10 (12 February 2016)

Captivating from first frame to last, visceral performances, from Michael Keaton and Emma Stone in particular, avant-garde inventive cinematography and score, surreal yet vivid, pithy, original, and very New York.
That's really all that need be said - no point blathering about the thin veil of separation between stage and life, the search for meaning, death of the ego, validation, love...
all aptly distilled in the epigraph:
"And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?"
"I did"
"And what did you want?"
"To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth"
{Raymond Carver, Late fragment}