Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman laments the current state of the film industry through a fantastic, intimate and trippy journey into the artist’s mind, where the battle between integrity and celebrity takes no quarter during an era of blockbuster movie dominance.

If projected schedules by certain movie studios go ahead without a hitch, the next 5 years or so will see over 50 superhero movies released in cinemas. Even those prophets of cinema doom who moaned the released of Star Wars back in 1977 couldn’t have envisioned such a glut of franchise excess.

With the cinema world (from production to exhibition) becoming more blockbuster exclusive, it only makes sense for a filmmaker such as Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu to ask: “Where do I belong?” While Inarritu’s movies are universal in theme, films such as 21 Grams and Biutiful are (as great as they are) hardly Saturday night popcorn entertainment.

So we come to Birdman, the closest Inarritu will ever get to making a superhero movie, yet is in every way the furthest thing from a superhero movie.

The film famously, inventively, perfectly stars Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomas, a onetime megastar of the (fictional) “Birdman” superhero series, who attempts a career comeback in the one place all Hollywood actors seek to establish credibility: Broadway.

While he deals with the ego driven, fragile personalities that make up his cast (Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough), mend the relationship with his estranged daughter (Emma Stone), and do right by his loyal manager (Zach Galifianakis), Riggan wrestles with a beast buried deep inside that urges him to go for the easy way out, by once again donning the mask and wings and fly high towards the Hollywood brass ring.

Of course having Keaton play Riggan brings with it much familiarity, since he famously played Batman to critical acclaim in the 1989 reboot of the series. But more importantly Birdman reminds just how great an actor Keaton is, delivering a performance that’s filled with stinging comedy, ferocious anger, and heartbreaking drama, all wrapped in a deep sense of melancholy. This is an “all bases filled batter at the plate” moment for Keaton, and he hits a homerun.

Edward Norton deliciously plays the prick method actor shtick with unabashed ferocity, in perhaps the best example of an actor ribbing their own reputation as “difficult” since Dustin Hoffman in the 1982 classic Tootsie. Great too is Emma Stone as the daughter who sternly reminds her father that to be relevant is to be “viral”. Cue Keaton running down Times Square in his tony whities to OMG reaction of revellers with iPhones.

Much like Fellii’s 1960 classic 8 ½ , Inarritu’s Birdman is a very intimate film about an artist’s malaise, yet is epic, innovative, and ambitious in approach. Inarritu captures the artist’s battle between ambition, admiration and celebrity with stunning scope and skill in the form of a one take format, as his camera sweeps through the backstage corridors, across the stage, out on the busy NYC streets, and back again in breathtaking fashion.  

There is little to no chance that we will ever see Inarritu direct a superhero movie. His philosophy is too pure and his imagination too original for such an assignment. However, come those 5 years when those 50 superhero movies make us crazy, be sure that Inarritu will be there with the original story and vision to save the day.

He is “Birdman”, after all.