Sebastian Stan stuns in ‘A Different Man,’ a skillful dark comedy of disfigurement

The old saying that beauty is only skin deep is subjected to a startling series of rhetorical reversals in “A Different Man,” whose protagonist is a disabled actor staring down his own disfiguring condition, as well as the internalized anxieties that go along with it.
Edward (Sebastian Stan) dreams of playing great roles on stage, but he’s limited by his neurofibromatosis. His resumé doesn’t extend much beyond PSAs about accommodating disability in the workplace, which he performs with barely veiled contempt for the material and himself.
When a gorgeous, flirty playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves into the apartment next door, Edward is smitten and, though resigned to the proverbial friendzone, hopeful about the possibility of a personal and artistic connection. He even gives Ingrid his antique typewriter in the unspoken hope that she might use it to craft him the role of a lifetime.
As it happens, Ingrid does eventually end up writing a play about Edward, but only after a series of surreal plot turns that wildly recontextualize both their relationship and the larger questions about representation at the heart of writer-director Aaron Schimberg’s screenplay. First, Edward undergoes an experimental — and borderline science-fictional — medical treatment that instantly removes any traces of his disease. Then he fakes his death, reinventing himself under the wryly existential moniker of “Guy.”
In his new guise at Guy, Edward is suave, confident and outgoing. He easily manages to bed Ingrid, who’s oblivious to his true identity. He auditions for her play — which is called “Edward” — wearing a headpiece of his earlier tumor-filled visage, but while he looks the part, he’s not particularly good at playing himself.
His sense of alienation becomes exponentially multiplied by the arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson), an actor with neurofibromatosis who’s a dead ringer for the real Edward. Oswald is like a malevolent figment in Edward/Guy’s imagination; his charming, magnetic personality throws a wrench into any assumptions (onscreen and off) that happiness and self-esteem are necessarily tied to physical appearance.
“A Different Man” marks the second collaboration between Schimberg and Pearson after 2018’s affecting behind-the-scenes comedy “Chained for Life,” which satirized the mix of squeamishness and sentimentality informing discussions around disability in cinema. (In that film, Pearson played a version of himself — an actor reckoning with his own potential exploitation in a movie about sideshow performers.)
The pair are obviously on the same fertile creative wavelength, and Pearson’s performance in “A Different Man” is bold and devastatingly funny — a wonderfully sardonic send-up of how, in life as well as art, empathy can metastasize into well-intentioned but idealized caricature.
As for Stan — who won Best Leading Performance at the Berlin International Film Festival — he negotiates the complexities of his role with aplomb, from acting under a prosthetic in the early sequences to thoroughly hollowing out his own Marvel-ratified handsomeness in the home stretch, so that a character who starts off a soulful, singular figure transforms into a finely sculpted cipher.
The skill and sophistication on display in “A Different Man” are undeniable, but if there’s an issue with the film, it may be that it’s ultimately too claustrophobically clever for its own good. At its best, absurdism reveals something about the larger world, but despite its varied and spacious subtexts, “A Different Man” gets narrower and more self-conscious as it goes along, to the point where its true subject seems to be not professional discrimination or duality but artistic sophistication itself. It’s movie whose true subject is its own intricate, Pirandellian engineering.