Review: In the slender and lovely ‘The Actor,’ an amnesiac clings to his identity

“The Actor” is an identity-crisis fable set sometime in post-WWII America, when jazz was still as raucous as music got. The year is hazy, the location is vague and the images are soft and fuzzy around the edges. Crisp details can’t exist because our lead, Paul Cole (André Holland), has amnesia. A member of a traveling theater troupe, Paul has been abandoned in a small-town hospital after a cuckolded husband conked him on the head. At least, that’s the story he’s been told.

The movie is as slim and ephemeral as Paul’s reality. One thing that’s sure is that Paul is from the first generation to grow up absorbed in screens. Film and TV are the framework these characters use to explain life, from the soap opera that assures its viewers that the show is a place “where everyone knows their lines” to a maniac who suggests Paul be clobbered again because she once saw a movie in which that fixed a broken brain.

In turn, the filmmaker Duke Johnson (who co-directed Charlie Kaufman’s soul-wrenching stop-motion drama “Anomalisa” ) uses art to explain his characters. Stranded somewhere in the Midwest with no family, friends or hobbies, Paul wanders into a movie theater that’s playing a cartoon in which Casper the Friendly Ghost meanders to the moon. The implication is clear: Paul is a lost soul.

“The Actor,” co-written by Johnson and Stephen Cooney, is based on “Memory,” a lost book by the prolific pulp novelist Donald E. Westlake, which was published only after the author’s death in 2008. (Westlake is most famous for his Parker series that’s been reworked to star everyone from Robert Duvall to Jason Statham, and he also wrote the script for the John Cusack and Annette Bening crime caper “The Grifters.” ) Technically, the story is a mystery-thriller. Paul doesn’t know who he was — or should be — and his quest to find out is beset by antagonists. A rural cop ( Toby Jones ) wants to arrest him for adultery. A loan shark (also Jones) demands a cut of his wages from a tannery where Paul’s trying to earn bus fare to the Manhattan address on his driver’s license.

But really, the core struggle is Paul’s inner conflict. He can’t decide whether he should stay put in the embrace of a charming local kook, Edna ( Gemma Chan ), or head back to the city where he suspects he enjoyed a more glamorous life. Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry’s fantastic score translates his options into music: Homespun Americana is all passionate strings, while New York City is hard and fast percussion that keeps pace with the pitter-patter of Paul’s racing heart. It’s the sound of an approaching breakdown.

The amnesia conceit allows the film to highlight its artificiality: painted backdrops, stages that recede into blackness, supporting players recast in multiple roles. (Stay for the end-credits reveal of which actor played what — the MVP is 71-year-old Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, who disappears into both male and female disguises.) Editor Garret Elkins is deft at disorientation. I loved a gag where Paul gets whacked from one side of the frame by a bird and from the other side by a duffel bag. Meanwhile, cinematographer Joe Passarelli moves the camera like it’s playing catch-up, using pans to show us that Paul isn’t aware of anything that’s not right in front of his face. Hours, even weeks, race by in the seconds Holland takes to walk from one set to another; later, a shot of Halloween stars melts into an image of Christmas snow.

Johnson has been trying to adapt “Memory” for 10 years. But of all the amnesia tales in existence, I’m not sure why he wanted to make this one. He’s uninterested in the book’s driving point: Paul’s struggle to make sense of a world where petty rules have supplanted community and common sense. Between the high cost of housing, the unhelpful unemployment offices and the cops finding excuses to harass him, Paul can’t find his footing, let alone his way home. Over the course of the novel, he learns again and again that the system sets people up to fail. His memory lapse hasn’t made folks meaner — it’s just made Paul unaccustomed to the hassle. “It’s too absurd to be a tragedy,” Westlake’s Paul sighs. “This whole place is stupid.” Ultimately, that Paul realizes it doesn’t matter who he is. The daily grind dehumanizes everyone.

But Johnson has bent the novel inside out and turned it into, of all things, a romance. Beyond a vague hamlet-good, urban-bad critique — a sleight of hand in which the heartland folks win out over those rapacious city dwellers — he’s less interested in the outside world than he is in Paul’s own emotional landscape. Can a kinder society raise a man who deserves love? We get hints that Paul’s previous self was a louse, but Holland’s smile is so soft that it’s hard to believe he was ever a nasty, selfish jerk. His version of the character can’t even grow a personality.

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. They might disagree, yet that doesn’t make either of them wrong. Willfully obtuse, perhaps, but that applies more to bad-faith viewers trying to get their hot takes to go viral.

Perhaps Johnson’s own decade-long struggle to make “The Actor,” only his second film, inspired him to dwell on the value Paul puts on being an artist. Actors are special, this Paul believes; he can hear it in a nurse’s excited trill when she reveals to him his past job. “I was — I am — an actor,” Paul tells Edna on their first date, even though he couldn’t quote a line of Shakespeare. As a counterpoint, when Paul makes the same boast to the hiring manager at the local tannery, she circles “unskilled labor.”

Paul clings to his old status — it puffs him up. But I suspect that Johnson appreciates the gulf between the glamorous idea of working in the arts and the bitter reality of intermittent paychecks. And the type of acting Paul has done — stage shows, live soap operas — evaporates as soon as his work is over. Art is nowhere near as permanent as, say, the penny loafers Paul helps make at the factory. Art may not even be a sturdy enough foundation on which to build a life. Even though “The Actor” sticks to the misty past, its anxieties are crystal clear in the present.

‘THE ACTOR’

MPA rating: R (for language)

Running time: 1:38

How to watch: In theaters