One man’s amnesia produces a melancholic miasma in The Actor, Duke Johnson’s first solo directing effort. Based on the novel Memory by Donald E. Westlake, which was written in the early ‘60s but only published posthumously in 2010, the project has been percolating since 2021, when Neon first bought the distribution rights. The influence of Anomalisa, the 2015 stop-motion film Johnson co-directed with Charlie Kaufman (who serves as executive producer here), is pronounced, namely in its surrealist examination of an identity crisis and the motif of characters visually blending into one another. Unfortunately, the final product reads more narratively rote than radical, lacking the incisive postmodern bite that Kaufman employs so well in his work. The versatile actors, ‘50s-era production design, and haunting score are equally executed with gusto, but the story—co-written by Johnson and his former NYU classmate Stephen Cooney—is one that you can’t shake the feeling of having seen before.
“You’re a bad, bad man,” purrs an unnamed woman as she and Paul E. Cole (André Holland, whose character’s middle initial nods to Westlake) excitedly make their way to bed in a seedy motel room. Before anything goes down, a shadowy, angry man—presumably the mystery woman’s husband—barges through the door; Paul cowers at his feet before being hit over the head with a wooden chair. Paul wakes up in the hospital, completely unaware of who he is, though his ex-lover’s sentiment may have carried a teasing kernel of truth. Informed by staff that he’s a well-known New York actor whose troupe has just split town, Paul decides to follow that lead, hoping that his lapse in memory is a temporary ailment. All he has to guide him is his ID, which carries his full name and Manhattan address: 125 Grove Street.
What he doesn’t anticipate is an angry detective lurking outside of the hospital to run him out of town. He gives the standard spiel about never wanting to see Paul’s face around here again, otherwise he’ll swiftly arrest him for the then-illegal act of adultery. Lacking the funds for a direct bus ticket to New York, he uses the little cash he has to get to the easternmost town of Jeffords, Ohio, which is perfectly quaint aside from the noxious smell of its central tannery. Paul decides to settle here for a spell, signing up for some manual labor at the tannery in order to save up for his fare back to the big city. He rents a room from a kindly older woman, his walls quickly accumulating with scrawled notes containing important information Paul’s sure to forget: the time he needs to be at work every day, the cost of a bus ticket, names of acquaintances that he randomly recalls.
Everything changes when he meets Edna (Gemma Chan), a local costume designer who’s, predictably, infatuated with theater. Paul reveals that he’s an actor and fibs that he’s in Jeffords researching a role. Soon, her address—312 Lark Street—becomes his most coveted note, leading him to his paramour’s arms on a regular basis. The only thing he commits to more frequently is the nightly airing of A Silent Heart, a black-and-white television drama he enjoys watching with his landlady. It appears Paul’s gotten more comfortable than expected, the only impetus for his return to New York a nagging feeling that he promised some people he’d be back by Christmas.
The most successful elements of The Actor arise out of an intersected interest in performance and psychology. Upon Paul’s eventual return to New York, he struggles to remember his closest friends and colleagues. Actors from the film’s first act in Jeffords embody the New York cohort—among them May Calamawy, Toby Jones, Asim Chaudhry, and Tracey Ullman—hinting at the protagonist’s inner desire to be surrounded by that community once again. The creative use of production design is also an asset here, especially when Paul decides to test his thespian chops. Everywhere in the city is rife for recreation, a startling revelation he encounters as he returns to set. He increasingly notices facets of his apartment appearing on productions he participates in. When it comes to creating a life for ourselves, what is purely constructed versus authentically conceived?
The fact that Edna is the one person that stands out to Paul certainly evokes Anomalisa, wherein the lead character experiences the Fregoli delusion and cannot differentiate the faces of even those closest to him, aside from one exceptional woman. Yet Paul’s wholesome infatuation with Edna is somewhat portrayed as a genuine salve to his previous tendency to womanize. It would seem that the blunt force trauma has brought out his best self: he is innately polite, attentive, and eager to please. Of course, these qualities in 20th-century New York translate as wimpish, making him an easy target for ridicule and violence. Richard Reed Parry’s score, which grows artfully dissonant over time, is essential for communicating this escalating tension.
The message at the core of The Actor is difficult to parse. Are our psychological ills predicated on the company we keep and the environment surrounding us? Do big cities produce selfish people while small towns promote a greater sense of communal understanding? Upon a hard-reset, would we all default to the most agreeable personality in order to evade interpersonal friction? Not only are there no answers to these questions, but no concerted effort to play with these prompts in a film that, otherwise, seeks to emulate an air of experimentation. Instead of unraveling into intelligent abstraction, Johnson’s film unfortunately leans into tidy conventionality. As a result, it might fail to make a lasting impression on the annals of cinematic memory.
Director: Duke Johnson
Writer: Duke Johnson, Stephen Cooney
Starring: André Holland, Gemma Chan, May Calamawy, Asim Chaudhry, Joe Cole, Fabien Frankel, Olwen Fouéré, Edward Hogg, Toby Jones, Youssef Kerkour, Simon McBurney, Tanya Reynolds, Tracey Ullman, Scott Alexander Young
Release Date: March 14, 2025
