In the early 1980s, Nicolas Cage got his first big breaks in Martha Coolidge’s and Amy Heckerling’s films that zeroed in on the peculiar allure of his dopey bad boy persona. Watching him was like eating a banana split: You tasted something nutty, sweet, indulgent, all-American. Since then, few actors have been able to match how nimble a polymorph Cage is in genre, how easily he power-bounces between action (“ ),
comedy (“ ) and horror ( ). In the new vampire comedy as he did in the bloodsucker-themed more than three decades ago, he plows through genres as hard as he chews the scenery. He’s done the same for a who’s who of boundary-pushing directors, including the Coen brothers ( ), David Lynch ( ) and Spike Jonze ( ). Not that every Nicolas Cage movie is gonzo; his sole Oscar win was for a sublime portrayal of an ugly alcoholic in the drama To get a sense of the Cage range, here’s a look at 10 of his performances from the last decade that paint a portrait of a man and his methods of madness. Each is rated on a scale of bees — one for sleepy, five for loony — in honor of the insects in the 2006 remake of . During on “The
Late Show With
Stephen Colbert,” Cage said David Gordon Green’s social-realist was one of his own five favorite Nicolas Cage films. (The others are Martin Scorsese’s Werner Herzog’s and two other films noted on this list.) Cage gives a brooding but un-bizarre performance as a troubled man who takes an abused teenager (Tye Sheridan) under his wing. It’s a prime example of Cage’s deep affection for playing straight-talking father-protectors. . In this widely panned comedy, Cage plays Gary Faulkner, a part-time ( ) construction worker who travels from his
Colorado home to
Pakistan on a one-man mission to capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice on orders from God, . Cage plays Faulkner as a living dad-joke who’s got Jerry Garcia’s looks and the Nutty Professor’s affect. Depending on your tolerance for filter-free jingoists, Cage is the best thing about this minor-league comedy from the director Larry Charles (“Borat”). . With Gina Gershon as his recovering addict wife and Faye Dunaway as his mistrustful mother, Cage was in good company with co-stars who know a thing or two about delivering onscreen fireworks. But in this lurid mom-gone-wrong thriller directed by Jonathan Baker, Cage gives a straight-faced performance as an affluent suburban doctor who gets caught up in a preposterous triangle with an identity-swindling, killer-lesbian nanny. There’s a word for a sincere performance in a ludicrous film that takes itself seriously: camp. Cage and Selma Blair star in this demented , written and directed by Brian Taylor, about suburban parents who inexplicably start killing their own kids in ridiculously gruesome ways. The signature Cage Crackup is on glorious display here when he sings “The Hokey Pokey” while obliterating a pool table with a sledgehammer, then delivers a blistering tirade about Gen X’s dashed dreams. (Check out for Cage meltdowns that will really make your eyes blow up.) Another of Cage’s favorite Cage films was Panos Cosmatos’s . He plays a lumberjack who avenges his girlfriend ( ) after she’s burned alive by cultists under the spell of a demented psychopath (Linus Roache). Cage’s performance, especially in the film’s brutal second half, is like watching a heavy metal album cover — from — come alive on Satan’s command. It’s blood-drenched, hallucinatory and dripping with testosterone. His character carries . It’s all id and all odd. . In Richard Stanley’s , Cage plays a farmer who tries to keep his family intact after a meteorite that crashes in their yard unleashes a supernatural haze with juju that possesses his wife (Joely Richardson). Cage’s portrayal is intense and demanding, but not all-out bananas. The film is based on an H.P. Lovecraft , an apt source considering the eccentric author was, like Cage, drawn to tales of unearthly heebie-jeebies and anti-authoritarian resistance. . On “The Late Show,” Cage said his favorite Cage film is Michael Sarnoski’s low-key, out-there, slow-burn . Of all of Cage’s films, this tender and dramatically propulsive story is perhaps the simplest: He plays a once-hotshot chef who sets out to recover his abducted foraging pig. Cage is deeply affecting, hiding waves of rage and resentment under a in a heartbreaking story about a brokenhearted human. It’s not a psycho performance, but it is a singular one. . As a drifter-janitor who fights possessed robotic animals at a Chuck E. Cheese-style playland in this , Cage doesn’t say a word. You’d think an
Actor who’s so committed to every absurd line a writer throws at him would be just as devoted in a nonverbal role. And he is, except all the director Kevin Lewis asks Cage to do is look badass in sunglasses and break stuff. It’s Cage 101. . Tom Gormican’s stars Pedro Pascal as a wealthy Nicolas Cage superfan who befriends a job-hunting actor named Nick Cage, played by Nicolas Cage. Cage’s performances are often self-referential. (In “Army of One,” his character jokes: “Don’t you think I look a little like Nick Cage in ‘Con Air’?”) Here, Cage takes that to the nth degree in a metanarrative that syncs his fandom’s Cage-related obsessions with his own reflections on stardom. It’s Cage-on-Cage dumb fun. In theaters. If Wayne Newton played a dime-store Dracula on it would look something like the ham Cage serves in Chris McKay’s comedy. Cage plays who’s so narcissistic that his emotionally battered manservant, Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), starts going to a codependency support group. With a face caked in cadaverous makeup that accentuates a cheeky smirk with teeny fangs, this bloodsucker is impossible to take seriously. For Cage, that’s called mission accomplished.