Imagine you could wake up one morning, stand at the mirror, and literally peel off any part of your looks you don't like — with only movie-star beauty remaining.
How would it change your life? How SHOULD it change your life?
That's a question – well, a launching point, really — for Edward, protagonist of Aaron Schimberg's fascinating, genre-bending, undeniably provocative and occasionally frustrating "A Different Man," featuring a stellar trio of Sebastian Stan, Adam Pearson and Renate Reinsve.
The very title is open to multiple interpretations. Who (and what) is "different"? The original Edward, who has neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes bulging tumors on his face? Or the man he becomes when he's able to slip out of that skin? And is he "different" to others, or to himself?
When we meet Edward, a struggling actor in New York (Stan, in elaborate makeup), he's filming some sort of commercial. We soon learn it's an instructional video on how to behave around colleagues with deformities. But even there, the director stops him, offering changes. "Wouldn't want to scare anyone," he says.
On Edward's way home on the subway, people stare. Back at his small apartment building, he meets a young woman in the hallway, in the midst of moving to the flat next door. She winces visibly when she first sees him, as virtually everyone does.
But later, Ingrid (Reinsve) tries to make it up to him, coming over to chat. She is charming and forthright, and tells Edward she's a budding playwright.
Edward goes for a medical checkup and learns that one of his tumors is slowly progressing over the eye. But he's also told of an experimental trial he could join. With the possibility — maybe — of a cure.
So Edward, spurred at least partly by frustration at not being able to get closer to Ingrid, joins the trial. These scenes take on the sudden feel of a sci-fi fantasy film — not awkwardly, but somehow quite smoothly shifting genres for a bit.
As for the medication, it starts working even sooner than anyone had hoped. Soon, Edward's skin is starting to come off in clumps. It's terrifying. And then he finds himself at the mirror, disintegrating before his eyes. But suddenly, Edward looks like — well, he looks like Sebastian Stan.
Naturally, life changes, and radically. When he goes back to the same bar in which he'd been stared at and left alone, he becomes everyone's buddy. A woman even wants to have sex with him in the bathroom. He catches his own eye in the mirror, as if to say: "What's happening to us?"
Edward now makes a momentous choice. He simply disappears from his former life and becomes a "different" person entirely. Now his name is Guy, and he lives in a nicer place. He also has a job as a real estate agent — the ultimate face-forward career, making use of his silky good looks.
But Guy is not, shall we say, comfortable in his own skin. Then one day, he sees Ingrid walking into a theater. She's holding auditions for the play she's written — about a man just like Edward. In fact, it IS about Edward. And he becomes obsessed with playing the role.
In the course of auditions, Edward runs into another actor with deformities who says, poignantly, "I was born to play this." Guy of course cannot say why he disagrees — which is that HE is Edward. Here Schimberg is tapping into the thorny discussion over casting, and whether disabled roles should only be filled by disabled actors, trans roles by trans actors, and so on. Adding layers of complexity to his film, Schimberg does both, in a way.
Or should we say, Ingrid does both. As playwright — and here, the superb Reinsve acquires an edge that her initial, sweeter incarnation of Ingrid lacked — she seems to understand instinctively that Guy, despite his dashing looks, has a connection to the character. She even lets him try rehearsing with a mask of his earlier self.
Enter Oswald.
It's shame we can't say too much about Oswald without veering into spoiler territory, because Oswald (Pearson) is the indispensable part of the last act here. Oswald is (as is Pearson) an actor who has neurofibromatosis, but in all other ways he's extremely different from Edward. He's outgoing, engaging, brimming with effortless wit — British, too — and interacts with the world in ways Edward could only have dreamed of.
Obviously, this will throw Edward/Guy for a loop. Early scenes exploring the dynamics of this unlikely trio crackle with possibility, discomfort, sometimes comedy, sometimes tragedy.
What is Schimberg ultimately trying to say? Here's where it gets tricky. He throws out some tantalizing questions about authenticity in life and art, not to mention how the way we look charts our destiny. Then, he doesn't so much answer them as shock us with head-spinning developments that feel, even for these wholly unique circumstances, as if they come out of nowhere.
But it's an absorbing ride, and Schimberg works with confidence and brio. On top of that his cast is so darned good, you want the story to go on and on — how about a trilogy, with everyone returning for sequels based on Oswald and Ingrid?
"A Different Man," an A24 release, has been rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for sexual content, graphic nudity, language and some violent content." Running time: 112 minutes. Three stars out of four.
