‘Mandy’ is the trippiest Nicolas Cage vehicle to date

As I waited in line to enter to see the wild, unconventional new movie Mandy, I overheard a particularly obnoxious attendee discovering that actor Nicolas Cage was the star of the movie. “I didn’t know he was going to be in this?!” — she said, her voice dripping with disdain.

And it was in that moment that I came to realize what an uphill battle this beautifully strange trip of a movie faces. Cage has such a bad reputation with so many moviegoers, not just because of his more mediocre recent output but because a plethora of internet memes have turned him into a total parody of himself. It’s a shame because he is frequently very in control of his whacked out performance.

This was/is one of our greatest actors -- who had a remarkable run from the late 80s into the mid-90s, until movie stardom made him a little bit of a sell-out, although there have been occasional gems over the last twenty years like Adaptation and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

In this movie, he gives an extraordinarily physical, unglamorous performance that is really something close to the peak of all he’s ever done before - eccentric and crazy - but also deeply funny and profound. But he is not the whole show here.

This is first and foremost Panos Cosmatos’ one-of-a-kind vision, this is one of the most visceral, visually audacious movies I’ve ever seen with unsettling sound design abc a nearly incomprehensible narrative that is almost impossible to describe.

It’s a real statement movie — whose pacing and bizarre tone recalls David Lynch — and an ambitious attempt to make a pulp revenge movie on acid, which feels like a tone poem.

Ironically, the presence of Cage will be the only curiosity for any kind of commercial appeal. It’s actually pretty amazing that such a deliriously weird movie even got made, and while I’m doubtful it’ll get widely embraced now, I’m betting it’ll become a stoner staple for years to come.

It’s not for everyone. You have to be willing to go for a gory, surreal ride.

The audience I saw it with was clearly struggling with the material. There were a lot of uncomfortable giggles and shifting in seats (while the film isn’t overlong, it has glacial passages that you’ll either buy into or you won’t). When it was all over there was a smattering of applause, some sincere, some sarcastic.

I felt as if I’d witnessed a very vivid nightmare—and I mean that as a compliment. Some of Nicholas Winding Rehn’s work has that same kind of audacity and I appreciate the dreamlike swing for the fences that Cosmatos is attempting here, even if many viewers will be dumbfounded by it.

It’s a tough film to classify — when I walked out in a daze, a complete stranger asked me what it was about and I couldn’t find the words. It’s sort of a horror film — kind of a revenge picture but it also has elements of fantasy, too.

I should have said it’s an even more drugged-out version of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. I’m a big fan of that film, and earnestly rebellious cinema in general, so yeah this one worked on me and will hang in my head for a long time.