“The Actor” is an identity-crisis fable set someday in post-WWII America, when jazz was nonetheless as raucous as music received. The yr is hazy, the situation is obscure and the photographs are tender and fuzzy across the edges. Crisp particulars can’t exist as a result of our lead, Paul Cole (André Holland), has amnesia. A member of a touring theater troupe, Paul has been deserted in a small-town hospital after a cuckolded husband conked him on the pinnacle. No less than, that’s the story he’s been informed.

The film is as slim and ephemeral as Paul’s actuality. One factor that’s positive is that Paul is from the primary era to develop up absorbed in screens. Movie and TV are the framework these characters use to elucidate life, from the cleaning soap opera that assures its viewers that the present is a spot “the place everybody is aware of their traces” to a maniac who suggests Paul be clobbered once more as a result of she as soon as noticed a film by which that fastened a damaged mind.

In flip, the filmmaker Duke Johnson (who co-directed Charlie Kaufman’s soul-wrenching stop-motion drama “Anomalisa”) makes use of artwork to elucidate his characters. Stranded someplace within the Midwest with no household, associates or hobbies, Paul wanders right into a movie show that’s enjoying a cartoon by which Casper the Pleasant Ghost meanders to the moon. The implication is obvious: Paul is a misplaced soul.

“The Actor,” co-written by Johnson and Stephen Cooney, relies on “Memory,” a misplaced ebook by the prolific pulp novelist Donald E. Westlake, which was printed solely after the writer’s loss of life in 2008. (Westlake is most well-known for his Parker series that’s been reworked to star everybody from Robert Duvall to Jason Statham, and he additionally 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 needs to be — and his quest to seek out out is beset by antagonists. A rural cop (Toby Jones) needs to arrest him for adultery. A mortgage shark (additionally Jones) calls for a reduce of his wages from a tannery the place Paul’s making an attempt to earn bus fare to the Manhattan deal with on his driver’s license.

Gemma Chan and André Holland within the film “The Actor.”

(Neon)

However actually, the core battle is Paul’s internal battle. He can’t determine whether or not he ought to keep put within the embrace of a captivating native kook, Edna (Gemma Chan), or head again to town the place he suspects he loved a extra glamorous life. Arcade Fire instrumentalist Richard Reed Parry’s unbelievable rating interprets his choices into music: Homespun Americana is all passionate strings, whereas New York Metropolis is tough and quick percussion that retains tempo with the pitter-patter of Paul’s racing coronary heart. It’s the sound of an approaching breakdown.

The amnesia conceit permits the movie to spotlight its artificiality: painted backdrops, phases that recede into blackness, supporting gamers recast in a number of roles. (Keep for the end-credits reveal of which actor performed what — the MVP is 71-year-old Irish actress Olwen Fouéré, who disappears into each female and male disguises.) Editor Garret Elkins is deft at disorientation. I liked a gag the place Paul will get whacked from one aspect of the body by a fowl and from the opposite aspect by a duffel bag. In the meantime, cinematographer Joe Passarelli strikes the digicam prefer it’s enjoying catch-up, utilizing pans to point out us that Paul isn’t conscious of something that’s not proper in entrance of his face. Hours, even weeks, race by within the seconds Holland takes to stroll from one set to a different; later, a shot of Halloween stars melts into a picture of Christmas snow.

Johnson has been making an attempt to adapt “Reminiscence” for 10 years. However of all of the amnesia tales in existence, I’m undecided why he needed to make this one. He’s uninterested within the ebook’s driving level: Paul’s battle to make sense of a world the place petty guidelines have supplanted group and customary sense. Between the excessive price of housing, the unhelpful unemployment workplaces and the cops discovering excuses to harass him, Paul can’t discover his footing, not to mention his manner residence. Over the course of the novel, he learns repeatedly that the system units individuals as much as fail. His reminiscence lapse hasn’t made people meaner — it’s simply made Paul unaccustomed to the trouble. “It’s too absurd to be a tragedy,” Westlake’s Paul sighs. “This complete place is silly.” In the end, that Paul realizes it doesn’t matter who he’s. The every day grind dehumanizes everybody.

However Johnson has bent the novel inside out and turned it into, of all issues, a romance. Past a obscure hamlet-good, urban-bad critique — a sleight of hand by which the heartland people win out over these rapacious metropolis dwellers — he’s much less within the outdoors world than he’s in Paul’s personal emotional panorama. Can a kinder society elevate a person who deserves love? We get hints that Paul’s earlier self was a louse, however Holland’s smile is so tender that it’s onerous to imagine he was ever a nasty, egocentric jerk. His model of the character can’t even develop a character.

It’s confounding that Johnson ignores the ebook’s brutal existentialism. Nevertheless it’s equally fascinating that different elements of the story get their hooks in him. A novel — any piece of artwork, actually — features like a dream. You seize onto the bits that resonate. It’s why individuals can go away the identical film with completely totally different interpretations. They could disagree, but that doesn’t make both of them incorrect. Willfully obtuse, maybe, however that applies extra to bad-faith viewers making an attempt to get their sizzling takes to go viral.

Maybe Johnson’s personal decade-long battle to make “The Actor,” solely his second movie, impressed him to dwell on the worth Paul places on being an artist. Actors are particular, this Paul believes; he can hear it in a nurse’s excited trill when she reveals to him his previous job. “I used to be — I am — an actor,” Paul tells Edna on their first date, despite the fact that he couldn’t quote a line of Shakespeare. As a counterpoint, when Paul makes the identical boast to the hiring supervisor on the native tannery, she circles “unskilled labor.”

Paul clings to his outdated standing — it puffs him up. However I believe that Johnson appreciates the gulf between the glamorous concept of working within the arts and the bitter actuality of intermittent paychecks. And the kind of appearing Paul has completed — stage exhibits, stay cleaning soap operas — evaporates as quickly as his work is over. Artwork is nowhere close to as everlasting as, say, the penny loafers Paul helps make on the manufacturing unit. Artwork could not even be a sturdy sufficient basis on which to construct a life. Although “The Actor” sticks to the misty previous, its anxieties are crystal clear within the current.