The Actor

Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance.

A captivating portrait of a man who can’t seem to remember who he is and may not ever be able to, Duke Johnson’s live-action feature debut is an enrapturing film that speaks in this language of half-remembered dreams before descending into something closer to a nightmare.

The movie looks amazing, it’s often intriguing, the style is evocative, and it should be distinct from Kaufman’s work. But in the ways that it’s similar, there’s less to be discovered––the ghost of revelation where it feels revelation could be.

Cuttingly funny at times, The Actor isn’t much interested in answering any of those questions, but this semi-inert death trip of a film teases a certain pull from its cosmic uncertainty.

It’s confounding that Johnson ignores the book’s brutal existentialism. But it’s equally fascinating that other parts of the story get their hooks in him. A novel — any piece of art, really — functions like a dream. You grab onto the bits that resonate. It’s why people can leave the same movie with totally different interpretations.

The Actor can be fun to think about, but hard to stay connected to. Johnson’s film works on an intellectual level — batting around questions about how identity is constructed — but the director struggles to translate the stakes of those questions.

The pat nature of its surprisingly sentimental conclusion only highlights the degree to which Johnson’s directorial interventions feel like attempts to gild the lily, registering as surface-level oddities deployed in a half-successful attempt to replace the psychological insight needed to truly explore identity in such an extreme scenario.