'Dream Scenario' welcomes you to Nicolas Cage's nightmare

It's maybe the best Charlie Kaufman movie that Charlie Kaufman didn't make.

It’s always a little strange when somebody tells you they had a dream about you. It’s flattering to know that you’re knocking around in their subconscious somehow. But it’s unsettling to wonder exactly why you’re knocking around in their subconscious.

Kristoffer Borgli’s “Dream Scenario,” perhaps the best Charlie Kaufman movie that Charlie Kaufman had nothing to do with, takes those sorts of questions to funny and disturbing lengths. Featuring Nicolas Cage playing against type as a middle-aged beta thrust into the spotlight, “Dream Scenario” doesn’t quite bring all its elements together in a cohesive whole – not unlike most dreams. But also like most dreams, it has a strange, disconcerting tone that tends to linger afterwards.

Cage plays Paul Matthews, a second-rate zoology professor at a third-rate college. With a high, reedy voice, bald head and a beard that seems less like a style choice and more just forgetting to shave, Cage plays Paul to passive aggressive perfection. When he teaches his (disinterested) students the value of keeping your head down in the herd to avoid predators, Paul seems to be imparting his philosophy for life.

But the spotlight finds Paul in the oddest way. Thousands of people, most of whom have never met Paul, start to see him in their dreams every night. In the dream sequences that Borgli dramatizes, Paul is a passive observer, a non-player character lurking in the margins of other people’s dreams.

Paul is as bewildered as anyone else about why he’s appearing in the dreams of strangers. But despite his mild protestations of privacy, he’s secretly flattered by all the attention that comes his way, and the thought that total strangers are thinking about him. “I’m a cool dad!” he enthuses to his tween daughter when he learns her friends have been asking about him.

He takes a meeting with big-time influencer Trent (a very funny Michael Cera) who tries to convince him to do product placement in his dream walks. But Paul is too high-minded to cash in. However, he’s not too high-minded to go home with Trent’s assistant (Dylan Gelula), who has developed a crush on him from her erotic dreams. Paul remains sympathetic in “Dream Scenario” not because he’s a good person, but because he’s too pathetic to really alienate the audience.

But then the dream-world Pauls start becoming more threatening and violent. turning Paul into a schlubby Freddy Krueger. Those strangers who once adored him now grow fearful and angry, and real-world Paul goes from social media darling to social pariah. 

“Dream Scenario” is a sharp parody of viral celebrity and cancel culture, as Paul’s public image crumbles for reasons out of his control – and that really have nothing to do with him. Paul doesn’t do himself much favors by being so whiny and self-righteous in the midst of the media firestorm, and Cage hilariously plays a mix of indignation and desperation as Paul’s life crumbles around him. 

Some of the side trips in “Dream Scenario” don’t quite work, such as a sequence involving “dream influencers” that feels like an outline for a “Black Mirror” episode that doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie. Better is the deadpan weirdness that Borgli brings to the material, the wild feeling that, just like in a dream, anything can happen next.

“Dream Scenario” is now playing in theaters.