COURTESY FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES

It doesn’t seem fair to bludgeon new movies with those of the past. But there are comparisons that filmmakers bring upon themselves by means of references to other movies. They’re not always the most enlightening comparisons (the similarities and evocations that a director intends aren’t always the ones that a viewer experiences), but they do sometimes prove revealing. The biggest surprise of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new film, “Birdman,” is its opening credits: the typography (as seen in the trailer) is borrowed from that of Jean-Luc Godard's color films of the mid-sixties, and Iñárritu’s credits are animated—with letters filling in onscreen in alphabetical order—exactly as Godard’s were in "Pierrot le Fou" (1965). I'd even say that the first shot, of clouds in the sky, accompanied by ethereal electronica, alludes to the first shots of Godard’s 1980 film, "Every Man for Himself."

To borrow a line from Ernest Hemingway—as quoted by Lillian Ross in her classic 1950 Profile of him in this magazine—it’s not a good idea for a filmmaker to get in the ring with Mr. Godard. Iñárritu doesn’t actually do so, but there is a Godardian thing about “Birdman”: the referentiality of the casting, which depends on real-world cinematic references. Michael Keaton, who formerly played the role of Batman, is cast here in the lead role in a quasi-art film. He is playing an actor, Riggan Thomson, who formerly played the movie role of Birdman and is now playing an earnest, arty role in his own adaptation and stage production of a story by Raymond Carver.

Iñárritu does with Keaton what Godard did with Eddie Constantine in "Alphaville" and “Germany Year 90 Nine Zero,” and with Anna Karina in many films: he fuses the viewer’s knowledge of the performer’s previous roles (and, for that matter, life) with the character that the actor plays. Riggan had played the flying superhero Birdman three times and refused “Birdman 4,” and his career went into free fall; Riggan is played by Keaton, who, of course, played Batman twice and refused to do it a third time, and whose career—if not exactly in free fall—hasn’t been filled of late with plum roles. In the movie, Thomson is heralded by the public as a onetime action hero, and he puts on the Carver adaptation (which he writes, directs, produces, and stars in) both to satisfy his untapped artistic drive and to reëstablish himself as an actor in the movie business.

“Birdman” seems to fulfill exactly the same function for Keaton, and it seems to be working: he’s newly endowed with “Oscar buzz.” The subject of the movie is an actor’s life, and, though it’s great to see that Keaton is back, that extra-cinematic fact is, unfortunately, the best thing about the film. “Birdman” is an exercise in cinematic half-assedness: it tackles big questions and offers conventional answers. It yokes technical audacity to ordinary drama and complex stagings to simple cinematic compositions. Its devotion to the art of performance exalts an utterly familiar and unchallenging style of performance. Here, too, Iñarritu borrows tropes and tricks from previous films and boils them down to their most common, least challenging elements.

Iñárritu films the story in what seems to be one continuous take (even though there are also transitions, achieved digitally, that sew together events that occur over gaps in time). The device was perhaps most famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his 1948 film, “Rope” (though that film does have several hard cuts between reels), and in Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 fantasy, “Russian Ark.” In neither film is the technique essential to the effect. Hitchcock positions his actors and moves the camera so that what seems to result is a series of shot changes, complete with close-ups and over-the-shoulder dialogue shots, that could also have been achieved with editing. In Sokurov’s case, the action takes place in the mind of its protagonist. The unbroken image string of “Russian Ark,” with a floating, gliding, and drifting camera gaze, could be taken as a visualized stream of consciousness, although the idea of the ninety-five-minute shot—the film as a work of conceptual art—is of greater power than its experiential impact.

There’s a signal moment early in Sokurov’s film, in which the protagonist wonders, “Could all this be theatre?” That, of course, is exactly what it is: an extreme long take involves making the action come out on time, like making trains run on time. It’s an administrative choreography of a most delicate theatrical artifice, and the weight of that artifice is a burden and a lure in the viewing of “Birdman.”

The modern cinema is borne of an ingenious critical misunderstanding: André Bazin's praise of the visual figure of long takes. They existed before Bazin was writing, even in the silent cinema, and sometimes in odd places (as in Harry Langdon’s silent comedy “The Chaser”), but in Bazin's view they were inherently praiseworthy: the continuity of action and relative effacement of directorial intervention through editing seemed to him to be an increase in documentary authenticity, a more honest and complete cinematic approach to reality. But soon, such filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Godard began using long takes not for their dramatic continuity or their directorial self-effacement but as a new form of directorial self-assertion—a passive-aggressive demand of concentration, an emphasis on the existential weight of time itself.

Following in their path, the conspicuous long take has become a trope of the modernist cinema, as in films by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, Tsai Ming-liang, Hong Sang-soo, Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, and others. They are distinctive directors whose differences are as important as their similarities, but their work fuses both extremes of the long-take technique, the theatrical artifice of staging and performance, as well as the documentary aspect of continuous recording. The long take is no more inherently praiseworthy, though, than any other cinematic device; there are films in which the long take seems as conventional and uninspired as quick cutting can seem in weaker action films.

In “Birdman,” the long take converts cinema to theatre—and back. It’s the story of a movie actor who renews both his art and his career by means of serious theatre. Iñárritu stages the action, onstage and off, like theatre; the camera is almost always in motion, and it follows the actors and their perfectly timed comings and goings and performances, which, as onstage, demand continuity of action and characterization. In lending movie acting the technical difficulty of stage performance, Iñarritu reinforces the theme of "Birdman"—the higher artistic dignity of acting in the theatre. What the cinema brings to the story is the idea of wondrous gimmickry—that of the continuous image itself, along with the element of fantasy, as the erstwhile Birdman seems to float in the air, to enjoy telekinetic power (and he does enjoy it), to fly through the streets like Birdman appeared to do onscreen. The movie is certainly a tour de force of planning and coördination, a sort of backstage theatre (behind the behind-the-scenes story of Riggan’s play) that would itself make for worthwhile viewing—it would even be of greater interest than the dramatic result.