Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.No one tell Joaquin Phoenix, but Joker: Folie à Deux is only the week’s second best psychodrama made with a pining for early 1980s New York. The actual winner of that contest is A Different Man, though you wouldn’t know it from the marketing. In the UK, Aaron Schimberg’s jagged black comedy is being released with fanfare so hushed, it may be audible only to bats. For those who do seek it out, the reward will be one of the most interesting films of the year: a singular tale of boy meets girl meets doppelgänger.The first of the male characters is played by Adam Pearson, the actor whose genetic condition neurofibromatosis causes extensive facial tumours. (You might have seen him in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin.) Pearson is British, but his character, Edward, is American: an actor too, though less successful. His face is the central fact of a life lived timidly in a cramped Manhattan walk-up while besotted with Ingrid, the wannabe playwright next door. (She is played by Renate Reinsve from 2022’s The Worst Person in the World.)The thought of a jobless actor and aspiring writer making the rent in New York feels wilfully dated: the ghost of a gamier version of the city, present too in scenes of exotic bar life and gags about Woody Allen. That stretch to reality also sets the tone for the turning point: an experimental medical process that “cures” Edward. (You can see the film as a less gory companion to last week’s feminist body horror The Substance.) The punchline is droll. An all-new Edward now emerges, played by Marvel actor Sebastian Stan. Yet even gifted with the features of a movie star, his aims stay modest. A job in real estate beckons.But this is not the last we see of Pearson. That much is down to a bravura flip Schimberg gives the script, keeping us off balance while questions spark from the film. Are we made or self made? Does what we see in the mirror ever really change? Ticklish ideas keep coming in a grimly funny movie that can even be weirdly uplifting in its own skewed way. The story comes to focus on Ingrid’s debut play, drawn from Edward’s life. Cyrano de Bergerac is referenced, but in telling the tale of a disabled character, the movie is very much about itself. The surprise is how self-aware it can be without losing the attention of everyone else. Schimberg deserves credit, so too Stan and Reinsve — but it is Pearson who brings depth and delight to this peekaboo game of life and art.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from October 4, and in US cinemas now
