Rare is the film that is so willing to map its protagonist’s successful and failed transformations onto its own sense of structure. As Sebastian Stan sheds his strikingly convincing facial prosthetics but retains his shy, hollow, and increasingly defeatist affect, Aaron Schimberg’s third feature only grows more complex, throwing in an increasing number of uncanny obstacles to his attempt to establish a new state of existence. This process, miraculously, comes across as sly rather than cruel, just absurd enough to register as humorous while retaining a core rigor of thought about an ever-expanding series of topics: the ethical means of representing people with facial disfigurements onscreen, the transformation of reality into increasingly “unfaithful” fiction, the continual confrontation of the self. Adam Pearson—as a man whose entire personage registers as the most genial cosmic taunt imaginable—embodies the playful spirit of A Different Man, which cuts to the quick with an omnipresent grin.