Tom Cruise in Digger

There is simply no way to discuss “Digger” without spoilers. Buckle the f-ck up.

No one will ever accuse filmmaker Alejandro Iñárritu of humility. No one will ever accuse Movie Star Tom Cruise of subtlety. No one will ever accuse their first collaboration, Digger, of cowardice.

Digger is a huge swing, a bold work and a bold performance with an astoundingly gutsy finale that is sure to piss off at least 50% of people who see it. This is not Tom Cruise of the last twenty years, dedicated to making movies audiences enjoy. Digger is a throwback to an earlier era of Tom Cruise, when he was more willing to take chances and make movies people might not actually like. If you don’t want to know anything more about Digger, stop here. If, however, you’re down for an actual critical discussion of a deliberately frustrating, at times infuriating, possibly brilliant film, let’s f-cking go.

Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up is a deeply condescending film, a satire that is dreadfully pedantic and, thus, dull. Digger has a lot in common with Don’t Look Up, chiefly that it is a political satire centered on climate change, but it certainly isn’t pedantic or dull. Is it good? Probably…? No…? Sometimes but not always…? I’m never sure “good” really matters when films are as bold and inventive and different as Digger. Certainly, Digger is not conventional. It has a Matryoshka plot built on a series of twists that completely undercut the narrative, at first, only then end up redeeming the whole experiment, maybe, probably, at least a little, in the end. Patience for Digger will vary person to person, I was mostly fascinated to watch Iñárritu and Cruise try to keep the train on its tracks.

Digger begins with Tom Cruise in old man makeup and a body adjustment suit as he stars as Digger Rockwell, a billionaire oligarch whose drilling activities in Greenland accidentally launches a giant ice floe toward Europe. There is no real way to stop the oncoming catastrophe, the ice is going to make contact with northern Europe and cause all manner of death and destruction. Digger postures with a bombastic US president, Compson (John Goodman, simply fantastic), and his obnoxious twit of a veep (Michael Stuhlbarg, reliably excellent). About thirty minutes in, a giant hand appears over the horizon. WTF.

The first turn: Digger isn’t about Digger Rockwell. It’s about Curtis Markson, an actor, also played by Cruise, who is portraying Digger Rockwell in a theatrical production of Fossil Fools, a play about an environmental disaster. Digger is worse than a musical, it’s a play within a film. Reader, when I say I almost jumped out of my seat and walked out, I am not kidding. For a moment, I was furious. They’re not even committing to the bit! The whole thing is a giant cop out! But I did not walk out, because I am a goddamn professional. I gripped my armrests and gritted my teeth and committed to seeing this folly through. And Digger…kind of rewarded me.

“Digger” is a goofy character, and Curtis is much more grounded. Cruise gets to play multiple levels and inject some actual nuance into his performance, something we haven’t seen from him in a while. His performance in Digger is more aligned with his work in films like Born on the Fourth of July, Interview with the Vampire, Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia, and Collateral than anything he’s been up to lately. Curtis is conflicted, unhappy with certain directions in Fossil Fools, and increasingly uncomfortable with the tone of the play. Throughout all of that, his daughter is on a flight that has vanished into the ether, a fresh tragedy unfolding as he depicts a previous tragedy.

Hand-in-hand with Iñárritu, Cruise manages to turn Digger into something deeper than its gimmick. At its best, Digger recalls work like Station Eleven, which interrogates the role of performance and entertainment and art in nourishing humanity in the face of tremendous inhumanity. At its worst, Digger will make you want to throw a film reel out a window, but at its best, it gets at something true about how humans persevere through even the darkest times.

Undercutting that, though, is Jesse Plemons as Kenny, a weird guy who keeps bugging Curtis. He’s the money man behind Fossil Fools and then comes Digger’s second turn: Kenny is the nephew of the real Digger Rockwell. The events of Fossil Fools really took place. The world has been reshaped by a terrible environmental disaster triggered by one oil baron’s greed, and Curtis is at odds with the production because he lived through it all and is uncomfortable with a silly depiction of what happened.

This is where Digger got me back on side and began cutting through its own noise—generated out of multiple gimmicky elements like Cruise’s appearance, the dual performance, the play within the film, and even Kenny’s revelation—with those kernels of truth about how we keep going and turning toward the light even when trapped in terrible darkness. Someone took a real-world disaster and turned it into a farce. Is that tasteful? No. But…Fossil Fools makes the audience laugh.

Did Digger need to be this complicated and gimmicky? Probably not. At times, it does feel like Iñárritu, who co-wrote the script with Alexander Dinelaris, Nicolas Giacobone, and Sabina Berman (from a story by Iñárritu, Berman, and Jez Butterworth), is simply overcommitted to the bit. Like he had the idea and then simply could not abandon it. There might exist a sleeker, more elegant way to tell this story. But Digger’s mess is sort of charming, even as it tests your patience—it’s like if a toddler was a movie. And Everyone IS super committed to the bit, which is not the Digger of the trailers but the dueling narratives and performances of the play within the film.

And then there is the gut punch of the ending, in which we actually see the reality of the world the real Digger Rockwell left behind. It’s awful. Of course, amidst such a bleak reality, people would seek farce and humor to cope with what’s left behind. Digger is a mess, it doesn’t entirely work, it’s infuriating at more than one point, it’s a satire of satire, which is obnoxious, but it’s so daring in its insufferableness that I have to, if not like it, at least tolerate it. Digger will infuriate and delight and lodge itself in your brain, not always for the right reasons. I was annoyed and entertained in equal measure. Is it good? I don’t think that matters when it’s so…of a muchness.

Digger is now playing exclusively in theaters.