Is Nicolas Cage a good or bad actor? This question might be a Schrödinger's cat of pop culture. In an episode of the US sitcom Community, trying to find the answer to this cosmic-sized query almost drives Abed Nadir mad. On the one hand, he has an Oscar, for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas and has worked with everyone Martin Scorsese to David Lynch and Werner Herzog. And on the other, since the 2010s, his name has become synonymous with direct-to-streaming action films that are low on plot and high on explosives, while causing critics to scoff and fuelling an ironic online fandom propelled by YouTube clip compilations with titles such as "Nicolas Cage freak outs".

–      10 films to watch this April

–      The Northman review: "Not weird enough"

–      Is Tom Hanks the last great movie star?

Every few years, though, he gives a performance that makes the world reconsider him yet again: his understated performance as an ex-criminal in Joe (2013), his depiction of petrifying, guttural grief in Mandy (2019) or, most recently, his heartbreaking turn as a man on a mission to recover his beloved truffle pig in Pig (2020). Every time, despite the acclaim he has received throughout his career, reviewers somehow seem surprised at what he is capable of.

In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage plays himself as he forms an unlikely kinship with a super-fan (Pedro Pascal) (Credit: Alamy)

This time, the film putting him back into critical favour is the buddy action-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, where Nicolas Cage takes on the most unusual, and certainly most meta, challenge of his career yet. He stars as "Nick Cage", a fictionalised version of himself, a frustrated movie star who is one rejection away from retiring from acting and living the life of a housecat. This Cage is an eager cinephile who wants to talk incessantly about The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and finds an unlikely kinship with a Cage mega-fan (played by Pedro Pascal) who has paid him $1 million to appear at his birthday party – only to then find out this admirer of his is a notorious drug lord.

If it's a tricksy conceit, then The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is nothing too challenging: it ingests the Cage-mania that has permeated the internet for the last decade or so and transforms it into an accessible bromance that doesn't overindulge in too much complicated meta-ness but instead lets him poke fun not at himself, exactly, but at the outsized, eccentric persona that audiences will have front of mind. One of the film's inbuilt jokes, playing on a core aspect of Cage's appeal, is the promise that he might do something kooky or wild at any given moment: turn around and pull a face until his eyes bulge unnaturally, or suddenly raise his voice. As Megan Mitchell, co-founder of Cage-themed film festival Cage-a-rama, describes, it's that "Cage element. Anything could happen at any time."    

As a movie star, Cage is nothing if not unique. He emerged before the age of celebrity obsession took hold, but is now embraced by online "stan" culture. He is associated with both high and low art; he is both serious about his craft and self-aware about his star image. There are more than 20 podcasts dedicated to dissecting the actor's career; a subreddit r/onetruegod that collects all things Cage; film festivals that only show Cage films in Europe and the US; and a new book, Age of Cage, that serves to explore the changing history of Hollywood through a Cage prism.

Filmmakers and fellow actors have been reverential about him. Lynch, who directed him in 1990's Wild at Heart, called Cage "the jazz musician of American acting". Guillermo del Toro recently tweeted that "there has not been, nor will there ever be an actor like Nicolas Cage. A master". Scorsese, who directed him in Bringing Out the Dead, described his acting style as "almost like silent film, like Lon Chaney". Ethan Hawke effused that Cage is "the only actor since Marlon Brando that's actually done anything new with the art".

But this adoration still doesn't quite explain the intensity of Cage's cult following. Is it because he is part of a dying breed of a certain kind of unknowable movie star we don't see much of anymore? The best kind of human meme? Just a really good actor? Or all of the above?

Nicolas Cage is in fact an invention of Nicolas Coppola, the nephew of filmmaker (and wine-maker) Francis Ford Coppola, who decided to ditch the famous surname to shake off the pressure that came with it. The name "Cage" is inspired both by comic book superhero Luke Cage and experimental composer John Cage – perfectly encapsulating the tightrope he has walked throughout his career between mainstream populism and the avant-garde.

Apparently, Uncle Francis wasn't too pleased about the decision – but he still cast him in his films The Outsiders (1983), The Cotton Club (1984) and in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986). There is only one film where Cage is credited as "Nicolas Coppola": 1982 teen sex comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in which he played an unnamed burger restaurant worker.

With his second-ever movie role, in teen rom-com Valley Girl (1983), he then adopted his new moniker and became a leading man; since then, he's been "the star of every movie that he's in", says Lindsay Gibb, author of National Treasure, a book-length examination of Cage's career and acting style. Through the 1980s, his stock rose thanks to heartthrob leading roles in films like Peggy Sue Got Married, the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona (1987), and Oscar-winning romance Moonstruck (1987), in which his character embarked on an affair of operatic proportions with Cher.

One of his best early roles was in 1987's Moonstruck, where, as the one-handed lovelorn baker Ronny Cammareri, he was an explosion of feeling (Credit: Alamy)

But despite becoming a hot property in Hollywood, he was certainly not a conventional one. In 1990 a profile in the Washington Post of him opened up with the somewhat barbed question: "Can Nicolas Cage play a normal guy?" The question should've been, really, "does Nicolas Cage want to play a normal guy?" Looking back at Cage's 100+ filmography, a pattern emerges – one of an actor choosing to embrace the unexpected in a journey full of experimentation and eccentric choices. Off-screen, meanwhile, he fancied himself a surrealist, and deliberately crafted a wild man public persona. The apex of this was perhaps the 1990 interview he gave on UK chat show Wogan, promoting Wild at Heart, where he karate-chopped his way onto the stage, took off his sweaty Wild at Heart t-shirt and did the rest of the interview shirtless in a leather jacket. "I was, quote, trying to invent my own mythology, unquote, around myself," he told the New York Times in 2019. A version of this early star persona, appears in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, in the form of a creepily de-aged version of Cage called Nicky, who also wears a Wild at Heart t-shirt, and taunts the present-day Cage to stop focusing on "acting" and instead be a Movie Star.

What's interesting these days, by contrast, is how reserved Cage is as a presence off-screen. The occasional tidbit about his eccentric habits (like speaking to his crow, spooning with his pet cat Merlin, or buying a pyramid-shaped tomb in a New Orleans cemetery) will emerge to social media delight, and the looming legacy of his financial troubles will come up as context for his over-prolific career, but otherwise no-one pays to much attention to his personal life. Perhaps it's because what Cage is doing on screen overshadows all else.

There are, I'd argue, four types of Cage film, or four Cage personas that define our idea of him. There's the Romantic Cage, passionately and desperately into a woman, tall, slender and doe-eyed but not classically handsome, ready to operatically punch through a wall, to serenade her with Elvis Presley songs and to pout gloomily if his beloved rejects him. Early work Valley Girl was a mismatched romance between a (you guessed it) valley girl and a rocker, played by Cage. It was also Mitchell's entry point into a lifelong Cage appreciation, after watching it at the age of 16: "The proto-Cage freakout and all the elements of Cage were in a very pure form, they hadn't really had time to become self-referential," she says. Then, a few years later, came Moonstruck: as the one-handed lovelorn baker Ronny Cammareri. Cage is an explosion of feelings ("I lost my hand! I lost my bride!"). It's easy to make fun of Cage's outbursts on screen, but his intensity, when it comes the matters of the heart, seems fitting. This Romantic Cage, pure of heart and devoid of irony, would reappear every so often in films like City of Angels (1998), The Family Man (2000) or Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001), but as he aged he could never quite recapture that youthful, lovelorn intensity.

At the same time, the Action Cage flourished, becoming a staple of 90s and early '00s mainstream cinema. In 1996, The Rock made more than $335 million at the box office. The following year, Con Air grossed $224 million and Face/Off, $245 million worldwide. His 2000 car-heist movie Gone in 60 Seconds made $237 million, and the 2004 adventure flick National Treasure made $347 million worldwide, despite mixed critical receptions. With these action successes, Cage proved himself a true marquee name, and this was when, Dibb argues, "the real Cage-mania" started. Before movies that were not part of a cinematic universe struggled with breaking even at the box office, before his name became synonymous with a smirk and direct-to-streaming efforts, Cage was a bankable action star who brought popcorn audiences to cinemas.

Across his career, there has also been a third, more understated type of Cage persona: the Arthouse Cage. Not that he is ever altogether understated. The same Cage-isms are usually there: the grotesque facial expressions, the unnatural accents, the deliberate physicality. Every Cage performance is a full-bodied one. But these relatively more restrained appearances seem to fit better into our understanding of what makes "good acting": think of his turn as a suicidal alcoholic writer in Leaving Las Vegas, a con artist with OCD and Tourette's in Matchstick Men (2003), two radically different twin brothers in Adaptation (2002) and, most recently, as the grief-paralysed widower in Pig. In fact, looking closely at these performances, the same kind of intense commitment to wild, physical expressions of emotion is visible, the same Cage-isms that are derided in action films – but when harnessed by an arthouse director, they seem to fit better into our increasingly narrow understanding of what makes for "good acting".

Con Air (1997) was one of the films that ushered in a new action-man Cage (Credit Alamy)

Then finally, in the late 2000s and 2010s, came a fourth Cage persona: the Unhinged Cage. This popular idea of Cage goes hand-in with his prolific direct-to-video genre output. Titles such as Rage (2014), A Score to Settle (2019), Kill Chain (2019) or Running with the Devil (2019) – all indistinguishable action fodder that use Cage's name as their main selling point – have served to erase decades of great performances and cement the idea that Cage is but a hack. In these films, Cage never phones in a performance, but saddled with thin scripts and B-movie direction, his methods of working stand out too much, and his intensity feels misplaced and mere fodder for parody and memes. A better vessel for this slightly self-parodically Unhinged Cage, however, has been horror, a genre he has only turned to recently, but which has seen him acclaimed for turns in Mom and Dad (2017), Mandy (2017) and Color Out of Space (2019).

However Cage's path from box-office draw and Academy Award-winning actor to online joke and ironic pop culture idol goes hand in hand with the people's general inability to accept that a person can be many things at once. "People only know him from whatever era they grew up in," says Gibb, "So if somebody grew up in the Con Air, Face/Off, The Rock period, that's all they know him for and a lot of times they love him for that but think that that's he's like that one note." It is difficult to separate, sometimes, the earnest Cage fans from the ironic ones, as dedication runs deep with both. Petros Patsilivas, creator and host of the Caged In podcast, which goes through every single Nicolas Cage film (and any connected ones too) episode by episode, saw his appreciation of the actor grow hugely through embarking on the project: "I was fascinated almost in a social science kind of way by someone who had this long career and was considered to be a joke to people. [I thought] 'maybe if I watch all these films I'll find out if they're right'. Not to be hyperbolic," he laughs, "but he's probably one of the greatest actors working today. He's not afraid to ACT in all caps."

The artistry of his acting

Indeed, any accusation thrown at Cage of being a bad actor, or not understanding acting, is misjudged. There is a reason for every scream, grin, and tremble, however unhinged they might seem on the surface. And these decisions are fully endorsed by the directors he works with: for example in romantic time-travel comedy Peggy Sue Got Married, Coppola stood by his choice to give his character a helium-esque high-pitched voice, despite the protestations of co-star Kathleen Turner and studio executives, who he has alleged wanted to fire him.

In such formative roles, he was experimenting with his craft and the malleability of his face, body and voice. In another early film, 1989's Vampire’s Kiss, Cage played Peter Loew, a yuppie literary agent who supposedly gets bitten by a vampire on a one-night-stand and starts going mad, believing himself to be turning into a bloodsucker. The source of many Cage memes, Vampire's Kiss was a mad-doctor's laboratory for the actor, who drew heavily from silent vampire film Nosferatu, ate live cockroaches and stretched his physicality to represent a man literally and emotionally tormented; a critic at the time described it as "scorched-earth acting". Cage plays Loew like a live-wire: he can be pleasantly still at one moment, and uncoil himself into a spitting state of fury the next, thrashing his long limbs around like a possessed tube man. He might punch you, he might hiss at you, or he might recite the alphabet.

Although Method acting and naturalism was de rigeur during the time of Cage's rise to prominence – and indeed the actor dabbled in it himself once, in his role as a wounded Vietnam veteran in Birdy (1984) – Cage preferred to take a more experimental approach to his craft that drew from his beloved German Expressionism, which is commonly defined by its "rejection of Western conventions and "the depiction of reality that is widely distorted for emotional effect" and the Japanese kabuki theatre. Cage found realism "boring", as he told the LA Times in 1994, and not a sure-fire way for the actor to locate the truth of a character ("Look at Cagney, was he real? No. Was he truthful? Yes.", he said in a 2013 interview.)

Cage has more recently turned to horror with success in films like Mandy (2018) (Credit: Alamy)

He also developed his own mystical ways of getting into character, which he has dubbed "nouveau shamanic", whereby he uses techniques or objects to expand his imagination and "trick" him into believing that he is the character. For 2014's Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, this meant sewing Egyptian artifacts into his costume, for reasons that are not entirely clear. In a recent interview, Cage professed he drew unironic inspiration from shamans, describing them as "really actors that were just going through stories in the village, and trying to bring answers to whatever the crisis was in the village", while adding that he came up with the concept of "nouveau shamanism" because "it sounded cool". This approach sounds mild compared to some of the Method shenanigans employed by actors like Christian Bale or Jared Leto, but the results on the screen carry a Cage-specific brand of intensity.

This intensity has been fodder for memes since they became their own language. But the memeification of Nicolas Cage has transformed him in the public imagination from a talented, methodical, if surrealist and eccentric actor, always working, always experimenting – to a selection of out-of-context facial expressions and scenes: Nicolas Cage yelling "not the bees!" from The Wicker Man (2006), reciting the alphabet in Vampire's Kiss, impersonating a particularly disturbed priest in Face/Off… "We've had that memeification and transforming of Cage from just an actor to a really notable pop culture figure that transcends his filmography”, says Mitchell.

Fun as it is, the problem with all this digital silliness is that it detracts from his genuine artistry. "There's people who just think it's fun to watch [him], that [his movies] are bad movies and are [merely] enjoying when he freaks out," says Gibb, "They're not really seeing the nuance in him." Cage-a-rama, Scotland’s first Nicolas Cage film festival, co-founded and programmed by Mitchell and Sean Welsh, actively avoids fostering that irony, which Mitchell finds "devaluing of him as an actor and ultimately devaluing him as a presence in other people's lives," she says. During Cage-a-rama, they try to "give space for that sincerity and pure love for Cage that we've seen grow over the years that we [have] run the festival".

Nevertheless, it's Cage's status as a meme that enables the existence of a film like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. And in fact, as it forces "Nick Cage" to confront "Cage-mania", it confirms, once again, that Cage is very good actor, actually. Perhaps too, it offers up a full stop to the jokey fandom that has percolated around Cage for the last decade – which can only be good for his career and the appreciation of his skills alike. In fact, a recent GQ profile put forth an obscenely simple idea, confirmed by his recent, extraordinarily wholesome Reddit AMA: maybe what best explains Cage is that he is "a sincere man in an ironic world".

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is released on 22 April in the US and the UK

BBC Culture has been nominated for best writing in the 2022 Webby Awards. If you enjoy reading our stories, please take a moment to vote for us.

Love film and TV? Join BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.