Nicolas Cage’s Dream Role

Nicolas Cage is either the man of your dreams or your worst nightmare in the feverishly bonkers fantasia Dream Scenario, a surreal sendup of internet-famous culture and the thorny repercussions of unearned notoriety. Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli, clearly indebted to absurdist visionaries like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, makes hilarious hay with the what-if notion of an ordinary person mishandling an extraordinary situation.

DREAM SCENARIO ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Kristoffer Borgli
Written by: Kristoffe r Borgli
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows, Dylan Gelula, Dylan Baker
Running time: 100 mins

Mild-mannered college professor Paul Matthews (Cage, relishing the beta-male vibes) gets no respect—from his wife, from his kids, from the academic circles where colleagues follow through on their ambitions. Which makes him the perfect chump for the alluring, elusive, mirage-like measure of success otherwise known as celebrity.

The less you know about Dream Scenario, the better—the major joy of the film is discovering what the hell is going on at the same time that Paul is trying to figure it out. But the gist of the title’s so-called scenario is that Paul becomes the object of people’s curiosity, affection, adoration, and ultimately repulsion—if not downright fear—all because of how pervasive he becomes in their minds.

“You don’t do anything,” says a perplexed ex-girlfriend, low-key haunted like thousands of others. “You’re just there.” Paul is an impotent presence, the kind of generic TV-News “area man” who’s trivial in his notoriety and as hard to shake as an earworm.  He’s an evolutionary biologist who teaches cognitive behavioral theory, and far more adept at blending into the crowd than he is in sticking out from the horde. He’s clearly embarrassed but deeply thrilled at all the attention.

Suddenly, his kids talk to him. His students give him standing ovations. His wife thinks it’s all pretty arousing. Is it astral projection or the Mandala Effect? Whatever it is, he’s got it. Worse yet, he doesn’t know what to do with it all.

And that’s the crux of Borgli’s cautionary tale: unearned flattery leads to an undeserved backlash if you don’t have any conviction behind your ubiquity. Empty adoration isn’t the same as true love. He’s still an unremarkable guy to a twentysomething hottie, no matter how many times she gets him to reenact her erotic desires. It’s impossible for other people to want you if you keep trying to be what they want.

Borgli’s last film, the wonderfully twisted Sick of Myself, was a portrait of one-upmanship between a poser-artist boyfriend and his resentful girlfriend desperate to be acclaimed for something—anything—even if it means destroying her own body. And our easily distracted, novelty-thirsting society is more than happy to rubberneck at the slow-motion car crash.

The obvious hot take on Dream Scenario is that it revels in the vapidity of the TikTok generation. But what makes it work as well as it does, in its thrilling first half and a less potent but still satisfying backend with a minor-key finale, is its lonely portrait of haplessness. Here’s a protagonist who genuinely doesn’t want to take charge of his life, a hero in his own mind determined to ignore the extent of his rudderless existence—or at least convince himself that it’s actually meaningful. Can he reverse course? Should any of us? We are who we are, Borgli seems to be stressing. No surprise that the film’s producer is Ari Aster, cinematic master of metaphysical doomscrolling. Be careful what you wish for. Or even better: just try to forgive yourself for being who you really are.