Lot to like but longer than it should have been

Rating: 8/10 (6 February 2015)

Riggan (Micheal Keaton) was once the biggest movie star on the planet when he portrayed the superhero Birdman but after Birdman 3 he decided he wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and started focusing on serious acting. However this didn't work out and now he is a washed up actor trying to do Broadway to revive his career and stay relevant, which is poetic because Michael Keaton was a phenomenal actor who never got his due once he stopped being Batman after 1992 (coincidentally the year the last Birdman film was released). Riggan is a complicated but vain character he is doing Broadway not because he cares about acting but because he is scared the world doesn't need him anymore, he wants to be wanted, he wants to be admired but not as The Birdman which is what he is most famous for.
Riggan's Birdman fame has psychologically damaged his mind and his alterego has taken a life of it's own and the voices in his head mock and demean him, they tell him to don the Birdman suit back on and make more money than the man in the tin can costume (Robert Downey Jr.). Maybe Riggan thinks if he is a successful Broadway actor he can get rid of The Birdman which haunts his mind, all these complex problems are left upon the viewer to figure out. This is the underlying most visited theme of Birdman the tussle between being an actor or being a star. I personally abhor superhero movies, why? Riggan himself said it best- "Just because it makes billions of dollars doesn't mean it's good, it's a piece of *&!@". This line was so engraved in my brain that Birdman instantly gained a lot of credibility and respect in my books. Ironically the only superhero movies I really like are Burton-Keaton Batman films and Nolan-Bale Batman films. Birdman not only parodies superhero movies and struggle of an actor trying to breakaway from it all it complements this by providing an excellent support cast with great stories as well. Edward Norton is funny, despicable and yet there are some scenes where I was overwhelmed by how sorry I felt for a man who was dead inside and only felt alive on stage. Emma Stone gives a career best performance but Oscar nomination maybe a bit too much for her.
The biggest and most obvious flaw is that the film has ample slow boring patches which alienate the casual audience (my theater's crowd got especially rowdy) but while alienating the casual audience it is not as cerebral as Gilliam or Lynch or Cronenberg thus even when you interpret and decipher the movie down to its basics you don't feel particularly intelligent after doing so. Further, the fantasy sequences feel a bit out there and are inconsistent with the tone of the movie.