A Different Man
Starring: Adam Pearson, Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve
Director: Aaron Schimberg
(2024)
Sitting somewhere between an Ealing comedy and a classic New York golden era goofball pic, A Different Man tells the story of Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with neurofibromatosis, a major facial disfigurement, who spends his life trying to be as unnoticeable as possible, despite harbouring desires to act.
When Ingrid (Renate Reinsve) moves in next door to his standard-issue, grotty apartment he falls in love. She is a budding playwright who seems not just un-repulsed by his disfigurement but positively enchanted by it. Spying some words he has typed that give vent to his sad existence only seem to make him more fascinating to her.
Edward’s life changes drastically when a new treatment removes the growths from his face and neck. After a painful transition he emerges a very handsome man, somewhat reminiscent of a slighter Jack Kerouac before the booze.
In the ensuing confusion Edward, his neighbours and doctors failing to recognise him, reinvents himself as, eventually, a very successful realtor, who, with his new good looks, literally becomes the poster boy for his employers.
Seeing Ingrid (who thinks he is dead) in the street he follows her to auditions for her play, an off-off-Broadway story of his own life, overly dramatised, and with the crucial speech based on the lines Edward wrote when he was still disfigured.
A Different Man feels organic and analogue, a lovely contrast to high tech modern cinema
Gaining the lead role in his new persona and jumping into bed with Ingrid who still doesn’t recognise him, his life is shaping up when Oswald (Adam Pearson), a charming and very personable man who has created a life for himself that defies his own severe neurofibromatosis condition, walks into his life.
Emitting a kind of deep, Jack Lemon-ish exasperation Stan’s Edward is buffeted around like a pinball by fate, taking us with him. The charming Oswald turns out to be highly duplicitous, ambitious and clever, all the things that Edward would like to be and the tension between Edward’s ineptitude and Oswald’s achievements are what drives the rest of the film, along with a large dollop of lovingly ironic New York cliches, from in-your-face unfeeling residents to the cockroach in Edward’s coffee.
Shot in just 22 days, A Different Man feels organic and analogue, a lovely contrast to high tech modern cinema and the, sometimes, not so subtle, right-on messages it contains are presented and dissolved of their preaching in the comedy of the tale. Catch this, it’s escaped from the indie ghetto and deserves your eyes.
Essential Information
Main image (L-R) Adam Pearson, Aaron Schimberg by Matt Infante. Courtesy of A24
Second image by Matt Infante. Courtesy of A24