Stop the presses, pass the Xanax: Nicolas Cage has another dopey-sounding movie coming out. This one's called Drive Angry, which is the sort of title that makes would-be parodists give up. On top of that, it's in 3-D—right, like what's been missing from America's experience of dopey Nicolas Cage movies over the years is the sight of his beseeching eyebrows bulging out of the screen like caterpillars scooting over busted statuary. But what the hell. Befitting his status as the most gonzo star ever to take home a best-actor Oscar—he makes Jack Nicholson look like a Swiss banker—Cage has never been Mr. Choosy about which films to grace with his quasi-epileptic presence. Considering how drab most of them would be without him, maybe we should count ourselves lucky.

By Hollywood standards, his Oscar was a few lifetimes ago. Cage won for playing the alkie antihero of 1995's Leaving Las Vegas, in retrospect the kind of movie that only seems memorable while you're actually watching it. He got nominated again—and shoulda won—for his dual role as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and Kaufman's imaginary twin brother, Donald, in 2002's Adaptation. Yet the Academy didn't even stoop to notice his squirrelly magnificence in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, so far the ultimate showcase for balls-out Nic Cage-ness on film. By now he's gone surfing for paychecks in so much crap that people think of him as a bad joke.

This offends my sense of life. A bad joke, really? At worst, give him credit for being a great one. And at best, give him credit for being great. One thing you can't deny about Cage is that he's got no obvious antecedents—not among leading men, anyway.

The Sisyphean poetry of Cage's trademark screen freak-outs is that he doesn't believe his tantrums will affect his situation. That's equally true whether he's just learned he's a vampire (Vampire's Kiss, way back when) or is simply agitated for some reason (damn near every movie since). The same way Bogart's sardonic rasp now spells "1940s" to us, hysteria à la Cage may be bottling our era's funks and spasms for future generations to uncork and gaze upon in wonder.

At another level, the Cage Paradox works like this: Early on, directors loved to cast him as a galoot or a numskull. Think the Coens' Raising Arizona or David Lynch's Wild at Heart. In action pics, though, he often plays some kind of brainiac—sometimes just as a plot device but occasionally with prattle to match (the combined Trivial Pursuit and Sudoku of National Treasure's Easter-egghead hunts). What that says about elitists' opinion of galoots and multiplers' opinion of eggheads is a matter of no concern to Cage. To him, they're just equally gnarly variations on all-American craziness, the reason Adaptation—which let him play both—was a folk tale disguised as a stunt. A guy who can hopscotch among opposites this breezily has a fair claim to being the idiot savant of modern movies.