When theater assumes central importance in a film, the emotions infused into the narrative reverberate like a beam of light reaching a liquid surface, shaping a palpable tension, a metalanguage that directs its inquiry upon itself, in a semantic short circuit that constantly interplays in the passage between the two artistic planes.

Emotions arising from the intense dialectical confrontation between the declaimed word and the filmed image, between being and appearing, between nature and artifice.

Theater and Cinema form a pairing whose variables have always existed in a complementary yet dichotomous relationship.

In this sense, Birdman picks up and extends the great tradition of films about theater that we have also analyzed in this list: works such as All About Eve, Opening Night, or The Rehearsal each offer, according to their own aesthetic hallmark, a distinct vision of theater as it functions within cinema and how this relationship is essentially at the core of cinematic expressiveness.

Iñárritu goes further: he makes the entire narrative revolve around the concept of theater, plunging the viewer into a kind of Limbo where the semantics distinguishing Cinema and Theater become blurred; even the very concept of Reality is deeply undermined by the dreamlike incursions that are part of the theatrical and cinematographic universe, in an iconographic potpourri that fascinates and disconcerts at the same time.

Riggan Thomson is an actor in the throes of a profound artistic crisis: his character Birdman, a sort of winged superhero who became famous thanks to a series of films he starred in, holds him hostage, denying him artistic outlets toward other acting dimensions.

Riggan is essentially a prisoner of his own performance and is, so to speak, its living embodiment, the inescapable mask.

To regain a new artistic consciousness, he decides to embark on the path of theater, working on an adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

His goal is to rediscover the essence of acting without artifice, without computer graphics, and above all, by re-establishing direct contact with the audience in the theater.

Riggan involves several figures in his project: Mike Shiner, a brilliant but aloof rising actor; Sam, his daughter, a former drug addict, who has a conflicted relationship with her father; Jake, his producer friend who follows him more out of commiseration than out of hope for success; and Lesley, an actress with big dreams but elusive charisma.

A titanic struggle begins between Riggan and the rest of the cast to manage to stage his script, but above all to create something that Riggan can feel as genuine, as a free artistic expression of his own idea.

Over everything, the ghost of Birdman hovers, following him like a shadow: Nemesis and Spirit Guide embodied in the same creature.

Riggan will find himself fighting against a growing number of difficulties, finding himself in often surreal situations where he appears to be a prisoner to himself, poised between quixotic aspirations and paranoid indolence.

A wonderful scene that encapsulates this paradoxical status is the flight scene: Riggan is contemplating the New York traffic from above, on the roof of the theater where his play is being staged; a man tries to dissuade him from moving away from the edge, but Riggan suddenly plunges into the void and begins to fly, soaring above the worries and burdens he is forced to endure: his flight is freedom, art, poetry.

We follow him, rapt; it is not known if all this is real, nor does it matter.

Only a man matters, his Art and his light levitation, like a creature woven of impalpable wind that has rediscovered a lost path in the night..