What begins inauspiciously as a nervy tableau about an unhappily married couple unmoored by the arrival of a duplicitous and tempestuous female boarder soon spins into a bizarre anti-anthology that breaks as many rules of traditional-storytelling as it can in its bewildering and enchanting 104 minutes. Writer and director Lawrence Michael Levine (Wild Canaries) sets out to defy the logic of filmmaking grammar, having his principal cast play variants of different characters without stopping to explain the leaps from one storyline to the next. In essence, Black Bear refuses to be caged. To any one style, to any one genre, to any one story. In a nutshell, it is a relationship drama meets a dark comedy meets an artistic deconstruction meets a survival story. Though certain to confuse and frustrate viewers looking for a more linear and easy-to-define cinematic experience, Black Bear remains a daring and boldly-acted pièce de résistance from a filmmaker disinterested in falling in line and fully committed to braving the wilderness of going it alone.

Punctuated by a repeating shot of Aubrey Plaza in a Bay Watch-red one-piece swimsuit, huddled in on herself on a dock on a chilly morning, looking mysteriously and forlorn out at the gently braying tide, Black Bear teases that all that we come to see over the course of the film is but the musings of a filmmaker, perhaps as they suffer from writer’s block. Be that Plaza’s Allison’s writer’s block or Levine’s, we’re left to ponder. Formatted like a skipping record, Levine’s story weaves webs of plot lines here and there, eventually attempting to intersect those tendrils to an actual black bear encounter, and then always returning back to Plaza in her red one-piece. Time is a flat circle, repeating back into itself, and so too does Black Bear revolve around this one striking image.

Unpacking what it all means isn’t easily accomplished after one viewing though one is left with the impression that Levine’s primary interest is to peel back the curtain on his own creative process. Plaza is a cipher for the torment of telling stories and the difficulty of cracking the puzzle that is a satisfying arc. In some regards, this is where Black Bear suffers. In dividing its time between two somewhat disparate but thematically similar stories; both of which are mainly interested in creation and infidelity; Levine basically delivers two short films ostensibly tethered to one another. But it’s hard to pretend that the film as a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

In the opening scenes, Christopher Abbott’s Gabe and Sarah Gadon’s Blair are married and expecting a child. The arrival of Plaza’s Allison, an acclaimed “feminist” filmmaker and self-described pathological liar, sends their rocky relationship spiraling and Levine leans into the melodrama of the splintering marriage and the increasingly obvious and cringy flirtation between Gabe and Allison. The scene-work is potent and uncomfortable, working from a strong script and bolstered by standout performed, but just as it climaxes, the film shifts gears, fizzling all the intrigue that it had set up to this point.

From here, Black Bear pivots to a story about a film shoot where Abbott is now in the director’s chair with Gadon and Plaza playing a pair of actresses who star in his production. Plaza is doubly good as an insecure and talented wife, who suspects that her husband and Gadon’s character (the rival actress and romantic interest) are getting it on between takes. This is a put-on from Gabe, who in a truly Kubrickian movie has manufactured this lie to seed jealousy within his wife in an effort to elicit the best performance possible for his film. Though it provides viewers with a rather dramatic insider-baseball glimpse of the workings of an indie film shoot, this second act fails to capitalize on the momentum of the first, though it is a refreshing and unique setting for a story about flickering, fading romance. It just feels like we’ve hit the reset button for reasons that I’m not entirely certain of and this is where Levine and his film struggle.

Bearing in mind that part of the allure of the film is also what makes it ultimately frustrating, a part of me does however wish that both segements of Black Bear were their own separate movie. Perhaps a two-part study of the incongruity of the creative process and romantic love and how the two cannot mix. Allen Ginsberg coined the phrase “Kill your darlings” referring to the challenge of self-editing and Black Bear ironically both is about killing your darlings (letting either romantic love fade to supercharge your creative energy or vice versa) and also suffers from not killing its darlings: from trying to tell two stories without ever fully telling either. But with such fantastic performances (particularly from Plaza and Gadon) and a bold commitment to defiant storytelling, it’s impossible to ignore the twisty, reckless ambition on display here.

CONCLUSION: ‘Black Bear’ commits fully to breaking rules of cinema, which may leave some bewildered or frustrated, but between its smart screenplay, saucy technical savvy, and all-around great performances, the odd-duck drama-thriller is absolutely deserving of your attempt to puzzle through it.