Overacted and overdirected, Mexican director Alejandro Innaritu’s Birdman presumes to comment on the excesses of show business yet is a tiresome example of those same excesses. It uses Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, the star of a Hollywood superhero blockbuster, who wants to do “serious” theater work by adapting a Raymond Carver short story. Riggan’s ambitions are beset by production problems from an insufferable cast to bad publicity, which only increase his suicidal anxiety.

Innaritu, responsible for such failed-ambition films as Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, loads on as many bad ideas as he can come up with: a magical-realism approach that includes Riggan’s own superpowers (he levitates and speaks with his Hollywood Birdman character alter-ego); his juggling relations with several women (Naomi Watts, Andrea Riseborough, Amy Ryan) as well as a recovering junkie daughter (Emma Stone); an actor more vain than himself (Edward Norton); plus an annoying visual scheme of nonstop, circling camera movement. All this backstage, film-savvy hubris puts Birdman in the unenviable company of Bob Fosse’s egotistical All That Jazz, which ripped off Fellini’s masterwork 8½.

But since Innaritu (one of Mexico’s “Three Amigos” along with fellow second-raters Alfonso Cuaron and Guillermo del Toro) is a practitioner of second-hand, art-movie concepts, Birdman isn’t merely set inside its hero’s head; it really takes place in Synecdoche, New York — the narcissistic fantasia that capsized Charlie Kaufman’s career by spinning a couple dozen neuroses too many. Inarritu’s facetious, half-camp approach to showbiz cynicism has Riggan clinging to his Birdman identity as a means of escape from his life’s mess — symbolized by absurdist moments like a half-naked footrace through Times Square amidst its mob of hateful, predatory celebrity-mongers, a scene designed to impress fans of Martin Scorsese’s misanthropic The King of Comedy. Maybe that’s why this disaster was chosen to close the New York Film Festival.

Narcissism, sentimentality, paranoia, and stylistic braggadocio are an insufferable mix. Like Riggan, Innaritu wouldn’t know a serious idea from a facetious one. Inarritu seems not to know that Robert Altman’s extraordinary 1993 film Short Cuts was an unmatchable Carver adaptation and through its personalized account of the culture’s nihilism, became the definitive prophesy of America’s social fragmentation. Yet Innaritu dares show the temerity to evoke Altman’s valedictory A Prairie Home Companion (especially its troubled child observer, played by Lindsay Lohan) and then poorly emulates the sinuous — and playful — long-take camera moves of Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player.

Birdman fails as satire when Inarritu resorts to CGI effects to convey Riggan’s hysteria (presumably to win over the Comic Con crowd). He’s insensitive to how technological F/X (including the praise of Internet trending that perplexes Riggan) are part of the dehumanization of contemporary art. Two conceited comments expose his cluelessness: When Riggan laments, “Did you know Farrah Fawcett died the same day as Michael Jackson?” and when a colleague’s passionate appeal is scoffed at as “That was Oprah, Hallmark, R. Kelly bad” — a combo proving Inarritu’s ignorance of Kelly’s depth and originality and genius — unpardonable for a movie obsessed with the idea of misunderstood genius.

But would a genius use a second-rate percussive score to call attention to his borrowed Brechtian alienation effects? Or resort to extreme close-ups (like Stone’s bulging-eyed flirtation, or Keaton‘s haggard desperation) to emphasize moments of “sincerity”? In these scenes of over-obvious “truth-telling,” Inarritu achieves the crudeness of Sidney Lumet working at full Network cacophony.

This film’s unrelenting smart-assed facileness comes from Inarritu’s pomposity. An insightful artist might take a bemused approach to showbiz, as in Peter Bogdanovich’s dazzling theatrical farce Noises Off or David Lynch’s surreal Mulholland Drive (as comic as it is terrifying) or, wittiest of all, Vincente Minnelli’s musical The Bandwagon. Inarritu’s lack of wit is exposed in scenes with a critic (Lindsay Duncan as New York Times scribe Tabitha Dickson) seen writing in a bar! Falsifying the reality that most critics kiss-up to stars; this snarky conceit is the emptiest attack on critics since Ratatouille — or TV’s Smash. So, of course, shill critics eat it up.

Hardest to stomach is Inarritu and cameraman Emmanuel Lubezki’s ever-circling, see-sawing visuals. Unlike Bogdanovich’s audaciously timed staging in Noises Off or the sensual, blissful, visionary camerawork of Mexico’s greatest director, Julian Hernandez, this style calls attention to itself, which precludes perception and feeling. A pause, or a cut, might provide intellectual rest and allow contemplation; Birdman’s antics just beg for applause. Banality, thy name is Inarritu.

***

“I’m not successful, I’m notable. There’s a difference,” says the obnoxious author at the center of Listen Up Philip — a Mumblecore 3.0 conceit by Alex Ross Perry, who knows whereof he navel-gazes, or mirror-gazes (same thing). This story of a careerist who plays at creativity while concentrating on womanizing captures the generational selfishness for which narcissism is too mild a term.

Unfortunately, the condition seems epidemic among the indie-film movement. So does the copycat mentality, and Perry captures this, too, when Philip (Jason Schwartzman, phenomenally holding a spoiled brat expression for over 90 minutes) gloms onto established author Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), whose quaffing, lazy lechery — and reputation — he envies. Perry apes literary affectation almost too well. Lines like “Without so much as noticing, Philip had lapsed into his usual pattern of hopelessness and self-sabotage” are like reading The New Yorker. So is “an infinitely replenishing prison of regret” — or was it “prism of regret”? The muffled/mumbled dialogue was often unclear, but it’s the damnedest thing since Wes Anderson made-up the word “friscalating” in The Royal Tenenbaums.

Horrible as it seems, Perry not only imitates Anderson but especially nepotistic Noah Baumbach; he represents the epigones who embody New York’s hipster class. Above all, he represents their coddled, self-absorption idealized from Woody Allen and turned into a social-climbing brand by Baumbach. Listen Up Phil echoes the title of Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily (but without the comma that sanitized that smutty pun) and uses a documentary-style voice-over narration that recalls Take the Money and Run — which reveals the real motivation for this type of privileged, trust-funded, crony-supported filmmaking.

Phil’s contemptuousness is more out-front and unabashed than Allen’s, but Perry is also more self-indulgent, if possible. “I think you’ve gotten far too in touch with your selfish instincts; it’s not healthy,” one girlfriend says, as if pinning a badge on an egotist. Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel was an Albert Schweitzer humanitarian compared to Philip; and mentor Ike is like the Bogart figure in Play It Again, Sam but live, not a revenant. Imagine if Perry’s Philip dared toady after a younger Baumbach type, there’d be blood on the screen — or else a circle jerk.

Instead, Listen Up Phil never explores literary careerism, egotism, and human exchange, as Jared Hess brilliantly did in Gentlemen Bronchos, so Perry settles for what a great pop musician once called “emotional fascism.” Perry shamelessly imitates his betters at their worst; only the arrogance is genuine.

— Armond White, a film critic, writes about movies for National Review Online and received the American Book Award’s Anti-Censorship prize. He is the author of The Resistance: Ten Years of Pop Culture That Shook the World and the forthcoming What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about the Movies.